The Zingara Project

Author: Lisa Hase-Jackson

  • Overheard at the Women’s Shelter by Susan Weaver

    Beyond thin office wall
    two voices stop me
    as I unfold the futon. I almost see them:
    in jeans and backwards baseball cap,
    honey-hued Rita, her shy, gap-toothed smile;
    and Lynn, slender, chiseled face, at 17 a mother,
    herself unmothered foster kid.
    A week ago – on New Year’s Eve –
    Rita turned 21.
    No talk of resolutions, but a cake,
    a pink and white confection Lynn had bought,
    one side damaged on its ride
    to shelter in the stroller.
    I smoothed the icing best I could
    and found three candles.
    “Two plus one make 21,” we giggled.
    By chance tonight I eavesdrop.
    Remembering why they’re here,
    I crave to know what new beginnings bring.
    In the next room Rita’s gentle voice recalls,
    “He says, ‘Think about the good times, not the bad.’”
    I hold my breath.
    Over Lynn’s wistful sigh, Rita’s tone has steel in it.
    “I say, ‘I got to think about the bad.’”
    I turn out the light, wait sleep, and pray.
    —
    Susan Weaver assisted shelter residents for twelve years on staff at an agency for victims of domestic abuse. She writes free verse, tanka, and tanka prose, and is tanka prose editor for Ribbons, journal of the Tanka Society of America. She lives in Allentown, Pennsylvania.

  • Strange But True by Bruce McRae

    If you put your ear to a stone
    you can hear the earth being born.
    If you eat a tree
    your breath smells like houses.
    (weep, willow, weep)
    When winking at a clock
    you travel in time;
    but you have to really want it,
    like sitting on an egg.

    Please, bear with me . . .
    An astronomer is someone
    snooping through the stars’ curtains.
    Snow is like an unread newspaper.
    (blow, wind, blow)
    Sunshine is an eyeful of planets.
    Dancing bears destroyed life’s tapestry.
    No two people drink water alike.
    And I’ve an umbrella made of fishes.

    Yes, this very spot, under that nickel,
    is where we’ll establish
    an irrefutable calm.
    This is where the ouroborous
    of malcontents
    becomes a green, keen
    thinking machine.
    Here’s where we turn
    flowers into men,
    gasps into groans,
    pillows into pillboxes.

    There’s a spike in a punchbowl.
    A hurricane with a black eye.
    An old tomcat hissing at a bitch.
    (I couldn’t write this fast enough)
    You need to turn three times
    and rub spit in your hair.
    When a galaxy implodes
    an angel dies in its sleep.
    When a telephone rings
    certain creatures in the Caspian Sea
    weep unsalted butter.
    The town of Dum Dum is in India.
    And I have my very own
    personal thunderhead.

    It’s true, if you drink lightning
    you’ll piss sparks.
    A hog is our governor!
    A letter arrived,
    addressed simply to ‘You’.
    The infamous thinking-cap
    is listed as for sale:
    still in its original packaging.

    And leastwise, but not lately:
    A witch weighs less than a bible.

    —

    Bruce McRae, a Canadian musician currently residing on Salt Spring Island BC, is a multiple Pushcart nominee with well over a thousand poems published internationally in magazines such as Poetry, Rattle and the North American Review. His books are ‘The So-Called Sonnets (Silenced Press), ‘An Unbecoming Fit Of Frenzy’ (Cawing Crow Press) and ‘Like As If” (Pskis Porch), Hearsay (The Poet’s Haven).

     

  • Annual Self-Preservation Scrutinization by M. Kaat Toy

    Checking our revered account balances, we see if last year’s resolutions have been cost effective or has their security been breached by the contorted cycles of our junkie brains that love to rob while renouncing free offerings as too repressive? Though it’s hard to climb the ladder of satisfaction with the tractor treads of military tanks, our logic brains persistently denounce actions unacceptable to their wills such as polishing the auras of all the mystical animals, raising their knavish energy and opening doorways to the higher realms. Because the practical alone is dangerous and the spiritual alone is ineffective, the twin clowns of war and thunder mock our arrogance and our wrath, tossing watermelons down on us from their rainy mountain where the fastidious knights we dispatch to guard the holy grail of the rigid little goals we set for ourselves corrode in the clouds.

    —

    M. Kaat Toy (Katherine Toy Miller) of Taos, New Mexico, has published a prose poem chapbook, In a Cosmic Egg (2012), at Finishing Line Press, a flash fiction book, Disturbed Sleep (2013), at FutureCycle Press, novel selections, short stories, flash fiction, prose poetry, creative nonfiction, journalism, and scholarly work.

  • Last Summer by Diane Unterweger

    Your journal of daily intention was veiled like wisteria
    in a thin warm rain. It seems forever sometimes—

    the Trail of Seven Bridges, pink tulle.
    We posed en pointe on the stairs.
    I wish I could have known how ordinary grace
    –the patio garden, our peeled willow swing—
    is circumstantial and measured as a saline drip.

    Dance the sky with me, sister—did we forget?
    Not behind me now, not alone.
    You wrote the body teaches
    that form is fate, that luck keeps count,
    our dreams between us past.

    Only now is ours, this gauze and shadow June,
    how a lesion blooms an answer—
    Lemon honey. A blue ceramic sun.

    —

    Diane Unterweger lives on the east shore of a small lake in Wisconsin. Her poems have appeared most recently in Gingerbread House, Not One of Us, and Naugatuck River Review.

  • On the Occasion of 50 Years of Poems by Alan Perry

    In this season of remembering
    what came before us,
    I think of snow.

    Kaleidoscopes of flakes
    that blanket bare spots,
    gently fill footsteps

    of trails to follow,
    and groove the streets
    to guide me home.

    As each crystal melts,
    it leaves a vanishing mark–
    a point of clarity condensed

    on skin–its final essence
    blessing me with a tap,
    comforting me with a presence.

    But this poem doesn’t adore snow.
    It loves the people who stepped
    in and out of stanzas,

    forming verses and images
    of lives between the lines.
    Each one’s unique countenance,

    like a snowflake found
    nowhere else, coming down
    to touch the earth

    and become it.

    —

    Alan Perry is a Minnesota native whose poems have appeared in Heron Tree, Right Hand Pointing, Sleet Magazine, Gyroscope Review, Riddled with Arrows, and elsewhere, and in a forthcoming anthology. He is an Associate Poetry Editor for Typehouse Literary Magazine, and was nominated for a 2018 Best of the Net.

  • Houston Snow by Deborah Phelps

    Before dawn, snow tips the loden
    Magnolias, the pin oaks, the dying palms.
    Frost lies pristine in the ribs
    Of the pines.

    At daybreak the whiteness recedes
    With children out of school
    Scraping it off the car hoods
    Into dirty snowmen.

    This half-inch is the first ever
    Seen by these children, and even
    Some of their parents, who try
    To take as many photos as possible

    For future, warmer generations.
    Afternoon, the coastal Gulf Stream
    Bumps the temperature
    Until snow is only barely
    Visible on hedge-tops

    A lace tablecloth kept for best.

    Deborah Phelps teaches at Sam Houston State University. She has published a chapbook, Deep East, and in journals such as Gulf Coast, Comstock Review, and Red Coyote. She lives in Huntsville, Texas.

  • 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.