The Zingara Project

Author: Lisa Hase-Jackson

  • Resistance by Marian Shapiro

    Ice whirling in our face. Snow angling side-
    wise. We pull our stocking caps deep
    over reddened ears.      Tilting forward.
    Pressing on.  Everyone agrees:
    this wind chill is a killer. Never-
    theless, the trees, bare of all but squirrels, remain
    still.

    Wait until Spring, they murmur.
    Then we will dance the dance of leaves. Re-
    sistance will be so lovely.

    —

    Marian Kaplun Shapiro, five-times Senior Poet Laureate of Massachusetts, is the author of a professional book, many journal articles, approximately 400  published poems, and three books of poetry. She practices as a psychologist in Lexington, Massachusetts.

     

  • Coldsurge by John C. Mannone

                After ‘Heatwave’ by Ted Hughes

    Between Huntingburg and frozen Indianapolis
    The Midwest plains had entered the fly’s belly.

    Like black-eyed rabbits half-buried in snow
    My plane shudders in the icy wind.

    The illusion of a runway is so real
    Trees sprout on it, and human carcasses.

    Only droning of the engine
    And no beacons for the hapless.

    I cannot penetrate the silence till sunset
    Releases its raptor

    Over the clouds, and birds are suddenly
    Everywhere, and my pilot’s flesh

    freezes in the breathing-in of great eagles.

    —
    John C. Mannone has work in Blue Fifth Review, Poetry South, Peacock Journal, Baltimore Review, and others. He won the Jean Ritchie Fellowship (2017) in Appalachian literature and served as celebrity judge for the National Federation of State Poetry Societies (2018). He edits poetry for Abyss & Apex and others. http://jcmannone.wordpress.com

     

  • Under the Weather by Rachel Barton

    remnants of ice fog sparkle like glitter
    frost crisps grass and thistle
    shimmer of holiday gift wrap ruffs
    the bin-on-wheels pulls me in a glide over a sheen of ice
    on slippered feet an unexpected ride
    down the drive to the curb

    this is the day after
    pajamas and frizzled ham on a plate
    an afterthought of toast and jam
    he sips espresso  through a blanket of foam
    folds himself back into a roll of fleece
    drifts into a dreamless sleep

    I survey the counter of holiday sweets
    palate dimmed by yesterday’s surfeit
    no more rush to prep or polish I pause
    as sun rises above the neighbor’s roofline
    a weak light slow to warm
    the tinsel of silvered grasses

    —

    Rachel Barton is a poet, writing coach, and editor. She is a member of the Calyx Editorial Collective, edits Willawaw Journal, and co-chairs Willamette Writers on the River. Find her poems in Oregon English Journal, Hubbub, Whale Road Review, Mom Egg Review, Cloudbank, and elsewhere. Her chapbook, Out of the Woods, was released in 2017. Happiness Comes is just released from Dancing Girl Press.

     

    …

  • ‘Tis the Season by Karen Wolf

    Blue eyes dripping sadness stare through dark
    rimmed glasses and Daddy’s Mopar
    truck windshield. My
    running pace allowing glimpses of his
    disproportionate pear-shaped scowl. Flashes
    of his life imagined
    schoolmate cruelties leveled for his
    countenance, name calling,
    social shunning, tripping, punches. A passing freight
    train halts my progress enabling a hello
    with Dad as he emerges from the post office, Christmas
    cookie in hand. His boyhood
    sadness crumbles away.
    —

    Karen Wolf has been published in Smokey Blue Literary and Art Magazine, The Wagon Magazine, Oasis Journal, Foliate Oak Literary Magazine, The Bookends Review, The Drunken Llama, Blynkt, Raw Dog Press, Street Light Press, Lady Blue Literary Arts Journal, Ripcord Magazine and many others. Her chapbook, “That’s Just the Way it Is”, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2018.

    She says that poetry soothes the savage beast and opens her eyes to the beauty that abounds within the world.

  • Silent Night Broken Night by Patrick Cabello Hansel

    María stumbles on the road
    into town and falls, baby first
    on the baked earth.  José
    stares at his virgin bride,
    his exile, his horn of plenty. He crouches
    to help her up, but she shouts “No!”
    He must apologize for the strange
    look in his eyes, for handling her
    like a stone the moment he first
    knew her weight.  The stars,

     pin pricks on the skin
    of heaven, look down: here
    are the children of earth, frozen
    in the wounding that precedes hope.
    No words redeem the time,
    or take the pain away.  There is
    sinew and bone break and breath.

     María and José look at each other
    in the last dirt before Bethlehem.
    Their eyes are cradles where no child
    has yet been lain.  José nods,
    leans María into his shoulder,
    and as the two rise as one, her water
    breaks onto her robes and his,
    his feet and hers, the dust, the stone,
    the river under it all.

    They walk, quicker now.  No donkey,
    no angel, no choir.  Just the hurried
    birth racing like wind. This child
    will not wait for shelter,
    his name rushes headlong
    through the dark tunnel
    that billows into waiting hands.

    There is hay and straw enough.
    His skin will be wrapped
    in the softest cloth.  Poor men
    will bring songs. No house
    dare hold this child.

    —

    Patrick Cabello Hansel has published poems in over 40 journals, including Isthmus, Red Weather Review, Ash & Bones and Lunch Ticket. His novella “Searching” was serialized in 33 issues of The Alley News and his book of poetry “The Devouring Land” will be published March 2019 by Main Street Rag Publishing. 

  • Invocation // The Beast That Resides in the Acute Angle by Gregory Kimbrell

    The cabbie’s right hand travels the warm flank
    of his unharnessed stallion, the striped woolen

    muffler still pulled tight across his mouth, as if
    to prevent himself from speaking aloud any of

    the things that come into his mind after a long
    day of work, before walking back down empty

    streets to his shared room. The turpentine has
    soaked through the earth floor at the west end

    of the stable, where a clever boy who ran away
    from home when he was still only fifteen used

    to sleep in the hay every night. But even when
    the world seems to forget us, the memories of

    what we have done can seldom be rubbed out
    completely. And sometimes the kids who look

    far older than they are loiter behind the bolted
    door to smoke, for kicks setting on fire unsold

    newspapers and watching them burn up in the
    rain barrel, wishing they could cause real harm.

    —

    Gregory Kimbrell is the author of The Primitive Observatory (Southern Illinois University Press, 2016), winner of the 2014 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Manticore—Hybrid Writing from Hybrid Identities, Phantom Drift, and elsewhere.

  • Northwoods Christmas Orphans by Nancy Austin

    We caved to the kids visiting in-laws on the real holiday.
    No, not chopped liver, I reassure my husband, coax a scarf
    into his ungloved hands, point to crystalline aspen and hoar-frosted
    huckleberry under the just-shaken snow globe sky.

    Tires crunch a path around the lake, a doe darts across the wooded drive.
    We kick off boots in a knotty-pine kitchen fragrant with cardamom, bacon, vanilla.
    Winnie whips up her cream cheese frosting, mammoth cinnamon swirls yield
    to our knives thick with sweet butter cream.
    Emily, energizer bunny of this geriatric cohort, converses too quickly to think
    between gasps of air, My friend can’t see with her immaculate generation.

    We gather around their woodstove after breakfast.
    Emily’s husband Ray recalls the year their Ford Fairlane
    broke down near a rural tavern/general store,
    Emily fills in every other phrase before he can finish.
    Bologna at the bar. Crackers that Christmas.
    Winnie and Ron remember a holiday alone,
    Rotisserie chicken with our fingers in the parking lot.
    They held one another’s gaze like a warm hand,
    as if to reaffirm life’s slights and disappointments
    form the glue that bonds, that comforts.
    I nodded to my husband with that same knowing glance.
    He narrowed his eyes, muttered chopped liver.

    —

    Nancy Austin has lived on both coasts, but prefers the land between. She relishes time to write in the Northwoods. Austin’s work has appeared in Adanna, Ariel, Gyroscope Review, Midwestern Gothic, Portage Magazine, Verse Wisconsin, and the Wisconsin Poets Calendars. Her poetry collection is titled Remnants of Warmth (Aldrich Press/Kelsay Books, 2016).

  • Predictable Patterns by Laurinda Lind

    I can’t stay centered on the winter solstice
    even in its most ancient aspect and certainly
    not its spendthrift one but when I was young,
    boxes of attic bulbs determined December

    along with trees that don’t belong inside
    and won’t stay up, but mean it isn’t always
    going to be this dark and cold, we’ll see
    ground again without snow. After years

    of take-apart trees and malevolent demented
    light strings I have failed in the Christmas
    category, either neglecting the tree till
    it shredded to the touch in April and could

    be scattered in the yard over leaves I never
    raked in the fall, or not putting one up at all
    so my daughter would come home from
    college and sigh and put it up herself, and

    once opened all my CDs. Stuck them on
    the branches where they shone silver like
    a Jetsons tree, assuming they would still
    have trees in that century, that the seasons

    will mean something after this terrible time
    where we are now, this dark we are not
    sure will take us through to spring, no
    matter how much tinsel we throw to it.
    —

    Laurinda Lind’s poems are in Another Chicago Magazine, Blue Earth Review, Blueline, Comstock Review, Constellations, Main Street Rag, and Paterson Literary Review; also anthologies Visiting Bob [Dylan] (New Rivers) and AFTERMATH (Radix). In 2018, she won the Keats-Shelley Prize for adult poetry and the New York State Fair poetry competition.

  • Copenhagen Morning by Darwin Pappas-Fernandes

    Eyes still sleepshod, I had myself almost convinced:

    the rooftops I see from my window, a church spire brave against the sky—
    it was the view from the fourth floor balcony of Vestergade 23,
    buildings swirled away in dimming snow.
    The day I was early to class, and she was early to class:
    the two of us alone with the city.
    She stepped sure through the window to me, touched
    my shoulder. I pulled my scarf down and away
    from my lips to say, what a beautiful morning,
    and she agreed.
    It wasn’t just a beautiful morning; looking at her
    against the soft dove sky, it was a beautiful view.
    We looked for the sun behind its barricade of cloud cover,
    we looked for hooded crows, grey and black, pointing for each other.
    I sensed her eyes on my cheek though we stood shoulder to shoulder,
    taking apart the paradigm by proximity.
    Peeking through the haze outside,
    I woke thinking Denmark was here, that I was there,
    not knowing, at first, how many years had passed. 

    —

    Darwin Pappas-Fernandes works in the Publishing industry in New York City. She graduated from Smith College in 2017, having majored in English and American Studies, with a Concentration in Poetry. Writing, and writing poetry in particular, has been a passion of hers since childhood.

  • After Words by Joseph Somoza

    I open your book of words
    to any page
    and begin reading,
    though, now, you too
    are dead like the others,
    another dead writer.
    There’s no way
    I’d be able to find you
    in New York, and,
    over coffee, ask you
    what you meant,
    where you were,
    when you wrote that.
    The words
    have to make do
    on their own now,
    which is what you hoped for
    in the first place
    when setting them down—
    ball-point in hand
    in your study, looking
    out at the street
    through upper-story windows,
    probably wondering where
    you might go walking
    afterwards.

    —

    Joseph Somoza retired from college teaching some years ago to have more time for writing.  He’s published ten books and chapbooks of poetry over the years, most recently AS FAR AS I KNOW (Cinco Puntos Press, 2015).  He lives in Las Cruces with wife Jill, a painter.

  • The Gift by Mary C. Rowin

    A dream that among things
    on offer I select a pair
    of light green baby socks.

    They are cotton, folded flat
    with some eyelet stitching
    around the edge of the cuff

    and like the Christmas cookie
    you bring home from the bank
    for me, wrapped in a paper napkin,

    I fold the socks and push them
    into my jacket pocket. Protective.
    To save for later.  Or to share.

    As if I could hold you in my palm
    like a small gift I chose for myself.

    —

    Mary C. Rowin’s poetry has appeared in various publications such as Hummingbird, Panopoly, Solitary Plover, Stoneboat and Oakwood Literary Magazine.  Mary’s poem “Centering,” published in the Winter 2018 issue of Blue Heron Review, has been nominated for the Push Cart Anthology.  Recent awards include poetry prizes from The Nebraska Writers Guild and from Journal from the Heartland, plus Honorable Mentions from the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets and Wisconsin People and Ideas.  Mary lives with her husband in Middleton, Wisconsin.

  • Winter Decoration by Frances Rove

    At the juncture of two branches,
    Blown by the wind and bounced about,
    Sits a small nest to take its chances
    And try to ride the winter out.

    Simple and barren, mud and leaves,
    Twigs and yet something else besides.
    Jostled by the stiff Northern breeze.
    Who can spy what soul in their hides?

    Is that tinsel waving madly
    On the too early budding tree?
    Frost will surely nip it badly.
    Far too optimistic are thee.

    But did the cold bird decorate,
    Choosing tinsel from other trash,
    To please his tiny, feathered mate
    With silver woven in their stash?

    I venture closer, I must know.
    Is it a trick of light or true?
    Is tinsel woven in or no?
    Surely, such a wise bird could do.

    YES, tinsel from our Christmas time,
    Chosen by some light-hearted bird.
    Woven in the sweet nest sublime
    And then undone without a word.

    Unraveled by the frigid winds
    Of the long, lonely winter nights.
    Is it like mere string, as it bends,
    Or is tinsel bird’s soul delight?

    Silver sparkles under the Moon,
    Chosen with purpose by the bird?
    Decoration fades all too soon.
    Wind whips, tinsel flies, all unheard.

    —

    Frances Rove is fifty-eight-year-old attorney on disability due to bipolar disorder who is writing a memoir and haas written poetry and short stories since grade school. She belongs to the National Association of Memoir Writers and Mensa and enjoys advocacy for mental health and adoption issues and for animals.

  • Christmas 2015 by Ujjvala Bagal Rahn

    ~(Tybee Beach)

    Under winter’s diamond night
    cross the shore of sunburnt youth.
    Underneath the ocean’s roar
    sighs our baby’s scattered dust.
    Denting gentle sands, our girl’s
    toddler feet made turtle trails
    lead you through the windy chill.
    Soon you’ll see us, far away
    underneath the shivering moon.
    Cradled in my hands, your gift
    wrapped in time’s dichroic foil.

    —

    Ujjvala Bagal Rahn’s poems have appeared most recently in Möbius: The Journal of Social Change, Frogpond, and Poetry in the Air (Jan. 21, 2015, WHCJ, Savannah State University). Her micropress, Red Silk Press (poetry, science, science fiction and memoir), has supported the Savannah Spoken Word Festival, Asian Festival, and Local Author Day.

  • Marilyn Monroe by Ellen Saunders

    We applaud, adore and adorn
    the holiday tree in Rockefeller Plaza,
    embellish its natural beauty
    and render it unrecognizable.
    When its brief stint in the starlight
    is over, the man-made magic
    gone, we’ll carry it to place far
    from view. Reluctantly, we’ll return
    to our tired selves, all the while knowing
    that there’s always next year. Another tree
    that once held a winter’s worth of snow
    in its arms. Another star on the horizon.
    Another chance to build up and tear down.
    The possibilities are endless.

    —

    Ellen Saunders’ work has appeared in Prairie Schooner, Poetry East, Toronto Quarterly, Calyx, Pearl, Apple Valley Review, among others. Her first chapbook, Masquerad” was published by Long Leaf Press. She is currently working on a second collection.

  • The Winter Finch by Markus Egeler Jones

    Around the steps the trees bend
    singing themselves to sleep
    in the bending time of early winter.

    Finches strain their necks
    fluffing and fluttering
    in the snowing, blowing afternoon.

    Cars down the road rumble past
    vibrating the air like new
    woofers at the downtown cinema.

    The finches jump with whispery
    anticipation clinging to feathers
    before they mingle into nightfall.

    It is a comfortable cold
    through the wind and snow
    stars are ornaments hidden by clouds.

    The cars muffle now and whether
    darkness or clouds or the quiet
    of a starless night, they drive softly.

    Even the fir trees are gone hiding
    behind the dark curtain of snowfall and steps
    the finches vanished without notice.

    —

    Markus Egeler Jones graduated with Eastern Kentucky University’s MFA. He is an Assistant Professor at Chadron State College. His first novel, How the Butcher Bird Finds Her Voice, was published by Five Oaks Press. His fiction and poetry appear in New Mexico Review, Crab Fat Magazine, The Story Shack, Temenos.