My books are sniping at one another
Hurling accusations concerning inaccurate information
On blood sugar and forceps.
Later on in the week I will make a bonfire
In the kitchen and scald their flapping tongues.
A mobile over the crib jiggles uncertainly.
The yellow bunny sneers at the spotted cow.
It knows nothing of midwives. Quaint word
From a simpler time when mothers died
With rags stuffed in their mouths to muffle the screaming.
I’ve discovered that I don’t need God.
A gazelle sleeps beside me.
I can feel its fur choking my breath,
I can taste the grass on its hind legs,
Alone in this angry house.
—
Beth Sherman received an MFA in creative writing from Queens College, where she teaches in the English department. Her fiction has been published in The Portland Review, Sandy River Review, Blue Lyra Review and Gloom Cupboard and is forthcoming in Delmarva Review and Rappahannock Review. Her poetry has been published in Hawaii Pacific Review, Hartskill Review, Lime Hawk, Synecdoche, Gyroscope and The Evansville Review, which nominated her poem, “Minor Planets” for a Pushcart Prize this year.
Author: Lisa Hase-Jackson
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Consolations after a Birth by Beth Sherman
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Six Years Old on her Grandparents’ Porch by Penelope Scambly Schott
Her life seemed like two nights and one day
where the first night had been birth
and the last night would be her death
and that single long day stretched so far ahead
filled up with future and furniture
she could almost rock in the white wicker chair
and forgive the world for making her a child
who sometimes still needed to hide
behind the rocker where the porch screen
pressed tiny diamonds onto her young cheek
while the man on the tall Sunday Philco
preached grandly Do unto others
but this girl didn’t want to be done unto
no she did not want to be so undone
Penelope Scambly Schott’s most recent book is How I Became An Historian. She lives in Portland and Dufur, Oregon where she teaches an annual poetry workshop.
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Floating World by Marian Olson
Floating World
Raven lands on the tallest pine,
a sentry at his post,
so orderly and calm
at the end of the day,
enough to make you believe
chaos is illusion.The great tsunami has returned
to its source, and the ocean
glows with a gentle pulse
in the sweet light of dusk.
Yet who can forget this morning
when the earth’s plates shifted
and believe once again
in the Garden of things?the moon rises
the moon sets
this floating world
—Marian Olson, the author of seven books of poetry) lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Desert Hours (2008) won top recognition in both the Haiku Society America and the New Mexico Books Awards. Consider This (2012) won first place in the e-book competition of Snapshot Press in the U.K.
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Stop The Clock by Bruce McRae
I remember,
you were pointing a stick
at the moon.
It was the day before
the wolf bit you.
Near to that incident
with the toothpick.
You were with a girl
who rubbed brass for a living.
I remember,
you had a signed edition
of a box of bags
and were dating an ex-nun.
Around the time
of the break out.
Sure, and as I recall,
you were studying wych elm,
or was it moonwort?
Either way,
that was the same summer
they moved the graveyard
into the secret forest.
Remember?
You had that awful sunburn
and a lung had collapsed;
the very same day
as the mudslide . . .
Makes you wonder, doesn’t it?
Makes you think
real hard.
—Bruce McRae, a Canadian musician, is a Pushcart nominee with over a thousand poems published internationally in magazines such as Poetry, Rattle and the North American Review. His latest book out now, ‘An Unbecoming Fit Of Frenzy’ is available on Amazon and through Cawing Crow Press, while in September of this year, another book of poems, ‘Like As If’, will be published by Pskis Porch. His poems on video can be viewed on YouTube’s ‘BruceMcRaePoetry’
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Sternum Words by Melissa Hobbs
Sternum Words
for Tom C.I sit at your feet listening.
A torch of earth-core liquefies
and low pitches spray
from your mouth.
You, the tight-throated volcano
pump mineral ash to sprinkle
my glacial snow pages.I stretch to catch
what doesn’t freeze
or burn my hands.
My baby volcano smolders.With sternum words
you set me on fire.
I nod, not knowing how
to use your power to powder
my charcoal for words.I have your fire stones
cooking in my basket
of ground grain.
Do I stir you
with mother’s walnut spoon
or silver tongs?
Melissa Hobbs’ passion revitalizes hearts in her writing. Retiring from regular work freed writing to fly from high-rises. She retrieves new writing after coaching high school freshmen, and working with Bhutanese refugee children. Her feet often return to Ohio’s rural paths, where she earned a degree at Kent State University.
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Guardian by Penelope Scambly Schott
A veiled woman stands tall
among stars. Every night
she rotates the shining sky.
Some of her stars are old,
others are not yet visible.
She’s been busy tending to stars
since before the beginning of counting.On earth she has four children
and each child is beloved:
water for spilling through channels,
air for hugging shapes,
loose dirt for its grit,
and fire for lighting the sky.
Her name is Do not despair.In her netted veil she watches
as a mama skunk drinks
from a stream that ripples over rocks,
the kits safe in their burrow
under the luster of stars.
The skunk’s white stripe
might be the Milky Way.
Penelope Scambly Schott’s most recent book is HOW I BECAME AN HISTORIAN. She lives in Portland and Dufur, Oregon where she teaches an annual poetry workshop.
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Jetman by Jonathan Travelstead
I rebuffer the YouTube video of Swiss ex-fighter pilot Yves Rossi
& watch this man-cum-black wing let go the rails & bail out of the helicopter
like a Navy SEAL, whirligig in a tailspun freefall until his aelerons
& helmet’s rudder lock in, tilting into clean air.I think of birds’ aerobatics. How the swift hatchling- plummeting
from the nest for the first time, remembers flight just in time. I see his manouevers
named in the comments. Falling leaf. Chandelle. Afterburners quilled
with kerosene for feathers, I watch him jockey in high definitiona wide, blue field & wish it were me barrel rolling the Alps with a ballerina’s
easy pirouette over shards of coal-dusted ice. I can’t see it enough,
the dream every generations’ boy dreams- whether Iron Man, or an eagle,
all of us wishing to attempt the split s. On replay I considerhis skull’s declension from the slab of black wing,
& the moment’s precipice where he submits to some higher plane of physics
that to the rest of us is only dark art. Shoulders camber forward then
he dives, puncturing cirrus, then cumulous cloud, contrails twistingat a moment past the last believable one when he cranes his head & body
in a half pitch skyward once more, a cough of flame as he cuts power,
pulls the ripcord on a ballooned parachute which lowers him
to the ground in a landing he- incredibly, survives.
Jonathan Travelstead served in the Air Force National Guard for six years as a firefighter and currently works as a full-time firefighter for the city of Murphysboro, and also as co-editor for Cobalt Review. Having finished his MFA at Southern Illinois University of Carbondale, he now works on an old dirt-bike he hopes will one day get him to the salt flats of Bolivia. He has published work in The Iowa Review, on Poetrydaily.com, and has work forthcoming in The Crab Orchard Review, among others. His first collection “How We Bury Our Dead” by Cobalt Press was released in March, 2015, and his “Conflict Tours” is forthcoming in Spring of 2017.
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In Memoriam by Sharon Scholl
I feel the sigh of thinking
about you, breath
carving out a riverbed of memory.Cool in the shadow
of my passing through,
scenes flicker – you standingin a door three summers
tall. I’m trying to find
your form, assemble love
from the labyrinth of places
that contained us, the web
of words that passed for truth.Your pulse is made of ashes.
Your being is a whirlpool
in the ripples of my brain.
Sharon Scholl is professor emerita from Jacksonville University (Fl) where she taught humanities and non-western studies. Her chapbook, Summer’s Child, is new from Finishing Line Press. Individual poems are current in Adanna, Caesura and, Rat’s Ass Review.
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Paint On Pasteboard by Peter Goodwin
I was about to chuck it, in a push to clear space
but the image, painted on pasteboard, looked vaguely
familiar, a winding river, wandering through lush woods,
triggering a memory of a long ago summer,
of picnics on a bluff, smiling women flirting,
the slow gentle current taking us, like driftwood,
floating along its curving meandering path, while
he set up his easel to capture the Ukrainian light.So much seemed possible, bathed in summer days
when Perestroika loosened the cold grip of communism,
who could have imagined that the regime would collapse,
Ukraine become independent and fritter its freedom,
imperial Russia return and that pristine river valley,
so close to Donetsk would become a battlefield,
the river washing away blood and pleasure, beauty lost
and almost forgotten, but for paint on pasteboard.
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Releasing the Dark Landscape by Martin Willitts Jr
The last sunlight falls behind the vanishing trees,
where it hesitates before leaving completely.
Some decisions are measured by regret.
Some of us, when we find ourselves old, notice this.Out on the prairie, someone tries to hold the land
together with barbed wire stapled to aging wood posts.
however I am the kind of person who brings cutters
and snip each sharp wire, and let the fields open.I am the kind who encourages yellow-throated meadowlarks.
When cut, the dark will be released; the air will be set free.
Doors on distanced houses ripple like muscles after working.
Some wonder why I do this, question idleness as the cause,suggest I had nothing better to do. I am the kind laws
are made to discourage people like me from acting impulsively.
I cannot obey, and sharpen the blades like a raptor’s talons.
I am the kind that knows outcrops sweeten with silence.I go to the wire to test it. It glints in moonlight and speaks.
It knows the quiet patterns of flight, the tactical for listening.
I should have brought the cutter, it slender purpose of justice,
the rusting wind caught on it should be freed. I touch barehanded.It slices like eyes. It whispers, be careful. The fields, spare me.
Yearning and ceasing are shadows lengthening, in stillness,
in the final ambient light, then, the meadowlark stopped —
only the robin’s sleepy-time sound is in this field, and it is held here.I experience the necessary absence. I also lose blood to its danger.
They say actions speak for you and what you stand for.
I have been listening to the suffering. Something had to be done.
When I cut, the earth flies away, like wings or leaves or regret.
___Martin Willitts Jr. has 11 full-length collections including “How to Be Silent” (FutureCycle Press, 2016). His forthcoming include “Dylan Thomas and the Writing Shed” (FutureCycle Press); “Three Ages of Women” (Deerbrook Press); and the winner of the Editor’s Choice Award, “The Wire Fence Holding Back the World” (Turtle Island Press).
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the erotic mind by Diana Raab
the erotic mind is not one born from dirt
but is one born from love—
only if you allow it to be
as you sit upon life’s teeter totter
pregnant with the possibilities
of all the joys which propel your happiness and peace
erasing the sin from lust
while embracing its beauty
and how it makes the heart pump
and come alive when it’s
just landed upon its deathbed.Reach out and touch someone
who will move you into the lust you deeply need,
the lust you crave every day,
Just allow lust to bring together your yin and the yang
leading to your everlasting ecstasy.
Diana Raab, Ph.D. is an award-winning poet, memoirist, blogger, essayist and speaker. Her book, “Writing for Bliss: A Seven-Step Plan for Telling Your Story and Transforming Your Life” is forthcoming in 2017. Raab is a regular blogger for Psychology Today, Huff50 (The Huffington Post), and PsychAlive. More at dianaraab.com.
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a frog does not have a tail by Michael Coolen
I watched an old man finishing his evening prayers
when a boy squatted next to him and said
I hope you are at peace, grandfather
peace only the old man responded
and you, boy, are you at peace
no, grandfather, I have questions
keeping peace away
what questions asked the old man
my little brother just died for no reason
he just died grandfather
why did Ebrima die so young
why can’t my mother stop crying
why does Allah let bad things happen to good people
the old man sat quietly for a minute
domanding, domanding, domanding boy
he replied
le ka nowulu
little, little, little comes the understanding of Allah
even for me some things make no sense
you may as well ask a frog why it does not have a tail
Michael Coolen is a pianist, composer, actor, performance artist, and writer. His works have been published widely, including the Oregon Poetry Association and Creative Non-fiction. He is also a published composer, with works performed around the world, including at Carnegie Hall, MoMA, and the Christie Gallery in New York.
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Valediction by Robert Beveridge
Valediction
It just doesn’t seem to matter to you if I’m here or not
Hiss of rain outside
the blank tape that ends the mix
unavoidablyYou just ignore me
no more single drops
steady stream down the windows
grey light blurs to bluegoodbye
grey room, air pregnant
with moisture
clouds on ceiling
will this rain ever end?
Robert Beveridge makes noise (xterminal.bandcamp.com) and writes poetry just outside Cleveland, OH. Recent/upcoming appearances in Pink Litter, The Algebra of Owls, and Main Street Rag, among others.
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Before Valentine’s Day by Kathamann
My clumsy suggestion lilts off my tongue
before any caution is exercised. It closely
appears to clutch at palpable implications
thickening with its weak composition
and becoming courage. The twisted
failure bends and shifts into my latest
list of blown communiqués.I quell the urge to carry the heavy roar
of human impulse, worthy though they
may be, of robust vigor. Guided to the
opposite, I sense minor implications reflected
with high gloss.Keeping the cosmic sparrows from predicting
grim behind-the-scene news stories, a mere
move may generate chaos.
I am a returned Peace Corps Volunteer/Afghanistan and a retired registered nurse. I have been active in the Santa Fe arts community for 30 years exhibiting in juried, group and solo exhibits. (kathamann.com) My poems have occasionally been published in local and regional anthologies.
The Zingara Project 