The Zingara Project

Author: Lisa Hase-Jackson

  • Charming by Laura Cherry

    To get to you I bit the apple
    at its loveliest spot, drawing the poison
    out and into me. I lay in my glass box,
    neither sleeping nor swooning, neither
    half empty nor half full, every nerve
    edged in black like a mourning letter.
    What the doves call song I call grief; but
    I waited.
                     Your charger found me first,
    nosing at my coffin, transformed
    from battle steed to foal by the scent
    of apples. You swung the hinged lid
    slowly: one last moment to fear
    my heart’s desire, all my new kingdom
    in your kiss.
    —
    Laura Cherry is the author of the collection Haunts (Cooper Dillon Books) and the chapbooks Two White Beds (Minerva Rising) and What We Planted (Providence Athenaeum). She co-edited the anthology Poem, Revised (Marion Street Press). Her work has been published in journals including Clementine Poetry Journal, Los Angeles Review, Cider Press Review, and Hartskill Review.

  • Running With The Wolves by Bruce McRae

    An hour of joy, an ounce of sorrow.
    This monumental moment, in part and in whole.
    I’m being touched by moonlight, so a little bit mad.
    Moonstruck and nightblind. Gone the way of the wolf.
    I’m lying in a loony half-light and recounting the myths,
    the stories we tell ourselves in order that we might carry on.
    Meaning imbued over coincidence. Memories shorted.
    The past redacted and redressed, so all is calm.
    You can put away those nerve-pills and quack confections.
    You can rest easy. Write a poem. Go whistle.
    A full harvest moon, and you can see into the darkness.
    You can sail that moonbeam over the shallows of paradise.
    Hang tight, my passenger, it’s full on into morning.
    —

    Bruce McRae, a Canadian musician currently residing on Salt Spring Island BC, is a Pushcart nominee with 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), all available via Amazon.

    Read these other poems by Bruce on Zingara Poetry Review: “Hinting at Eternity,” “Making Do,” and “Stop the Clock.”

     

     

     

     

  • Insomniac by Danielle Wong

    They called us destructive—
    tiny, wild animals
    caught up in cheap candlelight and
    high on back-alley weed
    or inky Pinot.

    Soured sweet memories of
    glimmering nights out and
    stolen weekends spent
    begging for the keys to
    your parents’ Chevy.

    The rare times they agreed
    were the best days—
    the only days
    worth all that
    trouble.

    We’d drive (and fight) and
    drive until we couldn’t even
    find our way back to that
    stuffy garage in your
    unnamed city.

     I swear you made
    my heart quiver
    when you sang
    slowly—
    the soft rhythm of your
    voice after a cherry-lipped kiss.

    Sure, there was that time
    when I broke your laugh
    and you cracked
    my heart into splintered shards…

    It just always seemed so
    pure—that addicting war we waged.
    The honesty of it, the
    unfeigned tenderness of it.

    The ineffable
    brilliance
    of you and me.

    —

    Danielle Wong is an emerging author living in San Francisco. Her debut novel, Swearing Off Stars, was published in October. Her work has also appeared on several websites, including Harper’s Bazaar, The Huffington Post, and USA Today. Beyond writing and reading, Danielle loves traveling, running, and watching old movies.

  • Let Me Explain by F. J. Bergmann

    Center stage in the Theater of the Observed, who am I to say
    that my voice is pleasant or my manners abysmal? Or something
    cataclysmal: a nexus of disaster, like knots that form spontaneously
    in windblown hair, and you try to pass them off as incipient dreadlocks,
    but no one believes you.

    I’m reluctantly approaching the age when the light at the other end
    of the carpal tunnel is a hot flash of … of loss of memory or …
    or rage! that was it! when you find yourself in an existential backwater,
    indistinct drifting forms slowly decaying in the sick conviction
    of temperature gradients,

    saturated with the metameric violet of an interminable hour
    where the monitor screen radiates a sickly glare the ethereal hue
    of Himalayan poppies, flecked with rows of suspect symbols
    like maggots paralyzed in mid-writhe and just as capable of producing
    an itching, irritated brain.

    My soul is portable and an unpleasant shade of green that wants
    embroidering, which I take to mean ostentatious lying. I don’t know what
    to make for supper tonight—thinking of alcohol, but it’s too much trouble …
    so I’ll just recycle leftover bad moods that won’t invalidate the warranty
    on my liver and lights.

    And when that fails to delight, I’ll come up with an enhancement device
    to effortlessly trigger a slow roll into the next moment, temporary levitation
    resulting in a mysterious accident: a loud splash from the room next door,
    where you and your spotted dog run quickly to slip on that broken thing
    melting on the floor.

    —

    F. J. Bergmann edits poetry for Mobius: The Journal of Social Change (mobiusmagazine.com) and imagines tragedies on or near exoplanets. Work appears in Abyss & Apex, Analog, Asimov’s SF, and elsewhere in the alphabet. A Catalogue of the Further Suns won the 2017 Gold Line Press poetry chapbook contest.

  • Blue Sky Day by Tom Evans

    It sometimes amazes me
    On a crisp sunny blue sky day
    Like today,
    That when a policeman passes me
    On the sidewalk and says ‘hello,’
    And makes me feel like a normal person,
    That he hasn’t seen
    Through me, and recognized
    Me for the imposter I am.
    But how could he know
    When I dress myself in decent clothes,
    My workplace just around the corner,
    In this small town where everyone
    Knows everyone,
    That I don’t belong,
    Terrified of being found out
    At any moment?
    And I am extremely grateful
    He lets me go on my merry way
    To make it through another workday
    Though I’d rather be anywhere else than there
    On a crisp sunny blue sky day
    Like today.

    —

    Tom, a librarian living near NYC, has recently had poems and stories published in Litbreak and Tuck Magazine, poems accepted in the Ann Arbor Review and Wilderness House Literary Review, and a first novel due out in October from Black Rose Writing.

  • A Flower Rests by Jerry Wemple

    Daisy rose later in the morning each
    day until she barely rose at all. Ark
    was left to get his own breakfast: peanut
    butter smeared on doughy bread; a pale
    apple in a paper bag to take for school
    lunch. He would shuffle down the slate sidewalks
    parallel to the river street doing his
    best to slow time and the inevitable.
    After school, the return trip home and sometimes
    there deposited on the couch in front of
    a blurred television his mother
    like a monument to a forgotten
    whatever. Sometimes she would cook supper and
    sometimes not. And sometimes the old neighbor
    woman would stop by and say mind if I
    borrow you boy for a while and then sit
    him at her kitchen table and stuff him full
    on greasy hamburger and potatoes
    and sometimes apple pie that was not too bad.

    —

    Jerry Wemple is the author of three poetry collections: You Can See It from Here (winner of the Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Award), The Civil War in Baltimore, and The Artemas Poems. His poems and essays have been published in numerous journal and anthologies. He teaches in the creative writing program at Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania.

     

     

  • Grading by Maryfrances Wagner

    We’ve watched
    the moon sag
    into tomorrow,
    ready to set down
    our pens.
    They argued
    their case,
    we ours—
    more detail,
    another example,
    better verbs.
    We’ve stroked
    our chins, pulled
    our earlobes,
    shifted our feet.
    Ink glides its
    well-oiled
    ball bearings,
    eager to praise
    a phrase,
    to find
    a moment
    of thought.

    —

    Maryfrances Wagner’s newest book is The Silence of Red Glass.  She is co-editor of the I-70 Review.

  • no consensus reached by Sanjida Yasmin

    four Fridays later, six
    bloodshot eyes confront
    eight boxes of hand-me-downs
    & that one house sparrow with
    the black goatee & white patch—
    startled by the shattered glass

    yesterday was about moving
    ten years from floor two
    to floor four—
    a good work-out

    today, the dusky dawn is
    filled with a goose egg;
    the fat house sparrow
    chirps a question

    followed by another starless night
    & when the goose egg finally sets,
    the sparrow & the owners lose
    pulse of the feathery momentums.

    —

    Sanjida Yasmin is a poet, writer and an artist who lives in the Bronx, New York. She splits her time between the Long Island Business Institute, where she teaches English, and St. Dominic’s Home, where she provides therapy and finds inspiration for her work. Her poems have appeared in print and online journals, among them are Pink Panther Magazine, Peacock Journal, The Promethean, Nebo, Panoplyzine, Poetry in Performance and Anomaly. She earned her MFA degree from the City University of New York.

  • On the Eve of Roberto Clemente’s Third Miracle by Michael Brockley

    He knows he could still drive Warren Spahn’s curveball into the right centerfield power alley. But he has moved beyond batting crowns and Hall of Fame inductions. Beyond the pleas of hospitalized boys who have read too many comic-book biographies. His intercessions restored a cloud forest in Costa Rica. Brought water to those who thirsted in Haiti. Still the earth is heavy with its old grief. Clemente knows there are brown men and women adrift in a sea where slave ships once disappeared. Knows the desperation of lives lived on the cusp of earthquakes. His miracles are burdened by the evil that creeps through chastened villages in limousines. His supplicants no longer pray in the language of the blessed. Their fears pulverized beneath churches crushed into shell-game stones and homes replaced by ghosts. The Great One has always known the ground rules. Purposeful in the face of another sacrifice, Clemente rubs pine tar into the handle of his Adirondack bat. He knows the plane is overloaded with mercy, and climbs aboard again. 
    —
    Michael Brockley is a 68-year old semi-retired school psychologist who still works in rural northeast Indiana. His poems have appeared in Atticus Review, Gargoyle, Tattoo Highway and Tipton Poetry Journal. Poems are forthcoming in 3Elements Review, Clementine Unbound, Riddled with Arrows and Flying Island.

  • Dwell by Gabrielle Brant Freeman

    Shoulders shake beneath my pressing palms, you angel
    of tangled blades and skin, you angel of need, of voice
    that leaps from skies slippery in stars like thunder.
    Outside, Spanish moss fringes in wind on its way to water,
    clutches at crooked trunks, at crooked branches stripped
    of leaves. Beneath me, you are made flesh, fallen in psalm.

    Hands slide down my smooth sides, fingers press praise
    into skin. Outside, the river rolls on as though you, seraph,
    are not burning here, as though your touch does not strip
    me bare, as though I am not scorched by your voice
    as you lift it and speak my name out over the water,
    as you cry out over the current, as you call the thunder.

    Crash and Roar and Boom and Clap! Thunder
    rumbles up through us like the rising scree of cicada song
    after they unearth wet wings, cling hard to bark, bathe
    themselves in warmth. Belly to belly, we tremble. You angel
    of arms and heart, you light-bringer. You voice
    the words that dismantle me, sacred words that peel, that strip.

    Love. Stripped
    down thunderbolt
    vocalization.
    Outside, green tree frogs squonk their night song,
    join the southern chorus frogs’ trill. Divine messengers
    heralding rain.

    There is the water of the river and the water of the rain,
    and, in the deep of night, there is only the brief strip
    before one becomes the other like heaven
    pushes into sky, the liminal space of sturm
    und drang. Urge and drive, we dissolve in symphony.
    You angel of pulse and breath, we are voiced

    together. Outside, the world turns soft into dawn, its voices
    change to birds and nattering squirrels. The river
    rambles, burbles around snags at its banks, sings its song
    eternal. We listen. Light filters through trees in strips
    that stripe our skin. The cat purrs like distant thunder,
    stretches in a spot of sun. This morning is splendor, you angel.

    May our voices flood this house forever. Storm and surge and strip
    and skin forever. Tide and lightning, blessed thunder
    bellow. May you kiss me into hymn forever. Make me an angel.
    —
    Gabrielle Brant Freeman’s poetry has been published in many journals, including Barrelhouse, One, Scoundrel Time, and storySouth. She was nominated for a Pushcart in 2017 and won the 2015 Randall Jarrell Competition. Press 53 published her book, When She Was Bad, in 2016. Read more: http://gabriellebrantfreeman.squarespace.com/.

  • Enough by Mary Dudley

    It wasn’t the cantaloupe at breakfast
    or the blue bridge spanning the highway
    on our way to this retreat.

    It was the black-paper hawk warning the small
    birds in the russian olives just outside the window
    to stop before they hit the glass,
    no matter if the oranges on the table called them
    or persimmons.

    Life has its boundaries,
    the hawk said.  It is not
    always air and light
    and free flight over the arroyos
    into canyons.
    You enjoy such freedom you do not even know
    how free you are, how free you’ve been.
    Stop at this glass.  Here.
    You have space enough
    You have no need to come inside.

    —

    With an M.A. in American poetry, Mary Dudley then earned a Ph.D. in early child development. She writes about and works with young children, their families, and teachers.  She’s published three chapbooks of poetry and her poems have appeared in a number of collections, including Zingara Poetry Review.

  • Reverend Billy’s Boogie Woogie and Mom’s Gulbransen by Gianna Russo

    The Palladium Theatre, Saint Petersburg, FL.

    We’re here for the Hillbilly Deathmatch.
    Two balladeers duking it out:
    heartbreak vs. boogie woogie
    Les Paul guitar vs. Steinway Baby Grand.
    The Friday Night music palace seeps age and glory–
    rows of faded velvet seats, wooden backs worn smooth
    from decades of sweat and delight.

    The balladeer’s got the guitar: his fingerwork is a cheery stroll,
    his second-tenor-muttered lyrics walking us around the yard,
    down the block to the intersection of Heartbroke and Wanting More.
    We’re referees: our seat-shifting and half-yawns call it:
    no way is that round going to him.

    Then Reverend Billy stomps on stage
    in a cowboy zoot suit and kickass boots.
    He pounces on the ivories, his hands
    the tarantella, the electric slide, the St. Vitus dance of boogie woogie.
    We hoot and jive in our seats.
    It’s a musical K.O.

    God, it feels good to get shaken this way,
    after months of putting the house to sleep,
    forcing a coma on one room at a time.
    Rev says he want to slow it down, play somethin pretty.
    Melodic and melancholy, it takes me
    to my mother’s back room
    where her old upright Gulbransen sags unsold, untuned.
    She filled the house with show tunes and old standards–
    South Pacific, Annie Get Your Gun, her low alto tremolo.
    It’s been mute for years.

    Rev caresses the Steinway.
    Behind him the velvet curtains are crenelated, ballooned.
    Above him the stage lights are blue as my mother’s eyes.

    —

    Gianna Russo is the author of the full-length poetry collection, Moonflower (Kitsune Books), winner of a Florida Book Awards bronze medal, and two chapbooks, including one based on the art work of Vermeer, The Companion of Joy (Green Rabbit Press). Russo is founding editor of YellowJacket Press, (www.yellowjacketpress.org ), Florida’s publisher of poetry chapbook manuscripts. A Pushcart Prize nominee, she has published poems in Ekphrasis, Crab Orchard Review, Apalachee Review, Florida Review, Florida Humanities Council Forum, Karamu, The Bloomsbury Review, The Sun, Poet Lore, saw palm, Kestrel, Tampa Review, Water-Stone, The MacGuffin, and Calyx, among others. In 2017, she was named Best of the Bay Local Poet by Creative Loafing. She is assistant professor of English and Creative Writing at Saint Leo University, where she is editor-in-chief of Sandhill Review and director of the Sandhill Writers Retreat.

  • Home for the Wayward Trans Teenager Leslie Anne Mcilroy

    I would put a sign on my door,
    but the vacancy is already filled.
    So many young people with their “T”
    and almost-hair on their faces.

    I love these boys, these “they.”
    They are bottomless pits —
    pizzas and apple juice,
    dysphoria and binders.

    I only meant to have one,
    but one is connected to the other
    and the other, and it’s not that
    the parents are bad,

    just that it takes a long time
    to turn “she” into “he.” And,
    they change their names,
    call the name you gave them,

    “dead.” You donate the dresses
    to goodwill, throw out the photos
    of ponytails and purses. You say
    “dead,” too, to your daughter.

    It’s only six months and already,
    you are saving up for the double
    mastectomy. You only cry a little
    now, but mostly fold the boys

    underwear, pack away the pearl
    bracelet, correct your family,
    “she to he,” “she to he” and then
    wonder why they can’t just be gay.

    —

    Leslie Anne Mcilroy won the 1997 Slipstream Poetry Chapbook Prize, the 2001 Word Press Poetry Prize and the 1997 Chicago Literary Awards. Her second book was published by Word Press in 2008, and third, by Main Street Rag in 2014. Leslie’s poems appear in Grist, Jubilat, The Mississippi Review, PANK, Pearl, Poetry Magazine, the New Ohio Review, The Chiron Review and more.

  • What We Leave Behind by Yvette A. Schnoeker-Shorb

    She appeared again today;
    the notch in her left ear
    was the same. Everything
    about her was the same
    except that she was dead,
    hit by a car in the road.
    I remember this deer
    from a month ago when
    she shyly nibbled an apple
    fallen from a struggling tree
    in my yard. So graceful
    an animal, natural
    and unpretentious, moving
    moment to moment.
    I wonder if she dreaded
    a universe that will go on
    without us in the future,
    as it seems we humans do.

    We leave so many marks—
    artifacts, photos, words,
    currency as if to purchase
    a place in history or keep
    our presence alive. We are
    a species attached to forever,
    but even with all our art,
    monuments, memories,
    diaries, sometimes eulogies
    so kindly and profoundly
    offered by those still living,
    the only thing worthwhile
    we could ever leave behind
    is our desire to be immortal,
    a will to survive, but whatever
    that drive is; in the end—deer,
    human—it really doesn’t matter
    as soon as the matter is gone.

    —-

    Yvette A. Schnoeker-Shorb’s work has appeared in Clockhouse, AJN: The American Journal of Nursing, Mount Hope Magazine, the Jungian journal Depth Insights, Terrain.org, and others journals.  She holds an interdisciplinary MA from Prescott College and has been an educator, researcher, editor, and is co-founder of a 501(c)(3) nonprofit.

  • Prairie Poem by Marc Thompson

    And one day I saw my life under the open sky
    and the open sky was orange and the wind
    came up from behind the trees that stood
    like sentinels before the mountains, and
    both trees and mountains were close enough
    to touch even though they were thousands
    of miles away.  It was the prairie grass that
    bent and swirled and bowed before the wind
    without yielding and that day I knew that
    when I was not the wind I would be the grass.

    —

    Marc Thompson lives and writes in Minneapolis MN where he keeps himself busy as the stay-at-home dad of a thirteen-year-old boy, writing poems, and doing volunteer work.  He has an MFA from Hamline University and his poems have appeared around the world in journals and in cyberspace.  He is the author of two chapbooks:  Ordinary Time (Laughing Gull Press) and Oklahoma Heat (Redmoon Press).