The Zingara Project

Author: Lisa Hase-Jackson

  • Walking an Old Dog by Lisa Chavez

    we rest more
    often. His eyes clouded
    with cataracts,
    hearing dulled
    so he startles
    sometimes.  His hips sway
    with ache, but he
    whiffles his way
    through a scent rich world.

    Walks are shorter, slower
    and even I see
    more–the caterpillar’s
    circuitous journeys,
    the pinon cones
    opening like fists
    dropping their treasure.
    We pause
    to look or sniff.
    Then head home,
    the sun behind us
    like the span of his years
    and our shadows
    thinning to fade,

    lengthening
    toward the end
    of the day.

    —

    Lisa D. Chavez has published two books of poetry, Destruction Bay and In An Angry Season. Her essays have appeared in Arts and Letters, The Fourth Genre and other magazines, and in anthologies including The Other Latin@: Writing Against a Singular Identity, and An Angle of Vision:  Women Writers on their Poor and Working Class Roots.  She grew up in Alaska and currently lives in New Mexico, and has a keen interest in Japanese dogs and in perfume. Find her online at lisadchavez.com

  • A Wild Hair by K.L. Frank

    A few errant fibers bristle
    from the fallow field
    below my chin, waving goodbye
    to more subtle golden fuzz,
    that once hummed in spring’s
    soft hormonal breezes.
    In blatant disregard
    of harsh depilatories,
    bleaching creams, and tweezers,
    these outlaw strands fly free,
    battle banners
    raised above years ripened
    past their summer prime.
    For now is the autumn
    of more brutish shoots –
    stiff dark hairs that defy
    any downward drag
    and thrust outward, splayed fingers
    reaching toward dreams
    muscles fatigued in the fight
    against gravity can no longer grasp.
    These hairs mark my last attempt
    to step up to the edge of etiquette
    and shout a challenge,
    my final foray into impudence.

    —

    Karin L. Frank is an award-winning author from the Kansas City area. Her poems, including haiku, and prose have been published in both literary journals and genre magazines in the U.S. and abroad.

  • Take the Apple by Michelle Holland

    Drag out books with dog-eared pages, find thatIMG_0924
    quote to make some sense of Adam and Eve,
    the doctrine of apple trees and the real
    story of knowledge. Take the apple not
    just to eat, but cast the seeds and make sure
    to spread them wide along the paths. Seek out
    that birdsong found on an ipod matching
    the birdsong from the lush cottonwood down
    by the ditch, to know a Bullock’s Oriole.
    Notice the canary-yellow bottom
    of a brilliant white sego lily
    balanced on its slender stalk. Truth rises
    in spits and starts, our own bird call, a trill
    of thought where the hummingbirds whirr and dive.

    —

    Michelle Holland has two collections of poetry, “Event Horizon,” included in The Sound a Raven Makes, (Tres Chicas Press) \ New Mexico Book Award winner 2009, and Chaos Theory, (Sin Fronteras Press).  She is co-poetry editor of the Sin Fronteras Journal, and treasurer of the New Mexico Literary Arts Board.

  • The Road to Heaven by D.G. Geis

    Unlike the Road to Hell,IMG_0907
    The Road to Heaven is paved
    With many things.

    Consider sparrows. They
    Make excellent base material
    And are seldom missed.

    And what about the Rabbis of
    Treblinka? Their prayers ascend
    Like incense. And ash packs well.

    Throw in a few starving children
    (Africans of course) and while you’re
    At it, an aid worker or two.

    And dogs beaten especially
    For television. Show the dogs
    With large eyes pleading

    For humanity, praying for the Dog
    Of Dogs to show his growling face,
    And from you, for ten dollars a month.

    Show the living room of the Good Shepherd
    Counting sheep on his 70 inch wafer-thin TV,
    Reclining in a Lazy Boy, kicking back with a

    Cold one, doing what Good Shepherds
    Always do. Taking a well deserved break
    From deciding who gets sheared

    and who gets slaughtered.

    —

    D.G. Geis lives in Houston, Texas. He has degrees from the University of Houston (B.A. English) and California State University (M.A. Philosophy).  He will be featured in a forthcoming Tupelo Press chapbook anthologizing  9 New Poets and is winner of Blue Bonnet Review‘s Fall 2015 Poetry Contest.

  • Nightscape by Sharon Scholl

    When you reflect on darkness,
    that it doesn’t thrust forward
    but shrinks to secret corners,

    when you see how birds
    fold languidly into it, cheeping
    softly in their feathers,

    the way cats’ eyes expand, yellow
    pupils taking furry draughts
    of its enticing blackness,

    how it spreads its viscous skirts
    over jeweled windows and ruinous
    gutters, over kisses and slaps,

    washing over feasts and graves,
    leaving every absence filled,
    every sorrow lost to dreams,

    it is oddly understandable
    why the weary old, the damaged
    do so calmly come to death.
    —

    Sharon Scholl is professor emerita from Jacksonville University where she taught the western  humanities courses and non-western studies (Africa, Japan).  Her chapbook, Summer’s Child, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press. Single poems appear currently in Adanna, Caesura, and Kalyna Language Press.  A musician/composer, she maintains a website that gives away free music to small choirs. She lives in Atlantic beach Fl.

  • In My Story by Chella Courington

    Peter all in blueDSCN3237
    flies from Mr. McGregor
    drops one shoe in cabbage

    and forfeits his jacket
    slipping under the gate.
    My hero outwits this farmer.

    In my story
    Peter finds me
    with a pink suitcase.

    But don’t mistake us
    no Alice and Mad Hatter
    no Grace and White Rabbit.

    We’re Chella and Peter
    in a wood at dusk
    far from family noise.

    He tells me his grandfather
    sacrificed his own tail
    to save Otter.

    I confess
    my father shoots otter
    and bruises me.

    I say
    some pain is worse
    than dying.

    Peter takes my hand
    under the harvest moon
    and stars float downstream.

    —

    Chella Courington is the author of three poetry and three flash fiction chapbooks. Her poetry and stories appear in numerous anthologies and journals including SmokeLong Quarterly, Nano Fiction, and The Collagist. Her recent novella, The Somewhat Sad Tale of the Pitcher and the Crow, is available at Amazon.

  • Sonrise by hakim bellamy

    In the center of this chest, is a solar system
    hovering above an empty plexus because
    someone left the light on. When the the stardust
    in these veins burn out, that Blackhole will find
    his way home and thank me for naming him
    after a wish. Terrified by the sound of his own vacuum,
    and everything else I left behind. Cursing me,
    beneath his beating breath, for all this space to fill
    and the unnecessary dying of the chakra.

    —

    Hakim Bellamy became the inaugural poet laureate of Albuquerque on April 14th, 2012, at age 33. He’s the son of a preacher man (and a praying woman). His mother gave him his first book of poetry as a teen, a volume by Khalil Gibran. Many poems later, Bellamy has been on two national champion poetry slam teams, won collegiate and city poetry slam championships, and has been published in numerous anthologies, as well as AlterNet, Truthout and Counterpunch. He was featured on the nationally syndicated Tavis Smiley Radio Show and has had his work displayed in inner-city buses. A musician, actor, journalist, playwright and community organizer, Bellamy has also received an honorable mention for the Paul Bartlett Ré Peace Prize at the University of New Mexico and the Emerging Creative Bravos Award. His first collection of poetry, SWEAR, won the Tillie Olson Creative Writing Award from the Working Class Studies Association. Bellamy is the founder and president of Beyond Poetry LLC. For more information on the author, please visit www.hakimbe.com.

  • softly by Carol Alena Aronoff

    sift the soil as if it held the delicate shell
    of your mother

    archaeology of dreams unfulfilled or pending
    astronaut adventurer marathon dancer

    dig up her wishes layered as onion, replant
    where memories of loss, disappointment

    threaten to overrun days in moon’s shadow
    there is no way to know the flowers that bloomed

    for a morning their scent may have lingered
    too faint for recognition

    with life ephemeral as blaze of autumn leafing
    fragile as moth wing in summer light

    take no notice of strident voices or mud wasps
    you know what this jewel is worth

    what facets still face away from sun
    it takes only a hand to turn them

    —

    Carol Alena Aronoff, Ph.D. is a psychologist/teacher/writer whose poetry has been published in numerous literary journals/anthologies. She is a Pushcart Prize nominee and has five books of poetry: The Nature of Music, Cornsilk, Her Soup Made the Moon Weep, Blessings from an Unseen World, Dreaming Earth’s Body. She lives in rural Hawaii.

     

  • We Go, Departing to Dusk by Emily Strauss

    Odd that earlier we existed,
    felt our own substance before
    disappearing to despair,
    sometimes gone by nightfall.
    We may linger awhile but
    the lamp will be snuffed out—

    and unless we steel ourselves
    to loss, our own and more,
    moons will dispel around us
    like a vase of flowers with wilted
    stems sinking into cloudy water—
    then we will lose our grasp.

    Surely, this early today, there
    remain the skins of opaque ghosts
    not yet torn from our ribs
    though we may remember the feel
    of yesterday’s body extinguished
    in our blood, lingering at daylight.

    —

    Emily Strauss has an M.A. in English, but is self-taught in poetry, which she has written since college Over 300 of her poems appear in a wide variety of online venues and in anthologies, in the U.S. and abroad. The natural world is generally her framework; she also considers the stories of people and places around her. She is a semi-retired teacher living in California.

     

  • sleep(less) night by Nicolette Daskalakis

    I woke from a dream I didn’t have
    from a sleep I didn’t fall
    into,
    and I asked you:
    What did you dream of?

    Nothing.

    I dreamt of nothing too.

    So as we laid in the silence
    of an unconscious night,
    I pictured someone
    hovering
    over us in the dark,
    mouth open,
    eating dreams
    we never had.

    —

    Nicolette Daskalakis is an award-winning filmmaker, poet, and multi-media artist residing in Los Angeles. She received a BA in film production from the USC School of Cinematic Arts and a minor in Intermedia Arts from the Roski School of Art & Design. Her first book, “because you’re now banging a French girl,” was published in 2015.

  • Prophylactics by J.T. Whitehead

    The interesting thing about him was that he never used to shared too much of himself.  He made it clear to others who went fishing in him that they could catch nothing but his very chilly cold.  He despised it when they shared too much information.  Then he paid back.  Once, a woman at an office party said she used to take her husband to a cottage down South, but that he was not the first man she took there, only the first that she knew she would be with.  He paid that woman back with: “That’s a wonderful story, Ann.  I lost my virginity at a drive-in theater in a train.”  She never shared anything with him again.  He considered himself liberated from her.  After that happened, we were stuck together on an elevator.  I sensed discomfort.  I asked him, “How are you?”  I didn’t want an answer, really.  But I sort of cared.  He answered, “Terrible.  I’m going through a divorce.”  “That’s terrible,” I said. “Yes,” he said.  “She fucked the Regional Director.”  This time I knew it was the truth.  He wasn’t saying it to keep me away.  He wasn’t making it up.  He wasn’t paying me back.  His wife must have really fucked the Regional Director.  His eyes had been scooped out.  They were melting in some one else’s cone.  It must have been the Regional Director’s.  I had belief.  This was truth.  “Why did you tell me this?” I asked him, as nonchalantly as possible.  “Two reasons.” he said.   “First, if people know that I’m going through a divorce, and I don’t tell them I was the cuckold, they will think that I was the Regional Director, the fucker, in all this.  Second, every time I tell someone, it’s like pulling a feather from a bird . . .”  I said, “How?”  He said, “I’ll have a naked chicken.  Like one of those rubber chickens they used in those old vaudeville acts, to hit someone in the face.”  I asked him, “Did anything come of this?”  He said, “No children.”  I said “Well . . . in a manner of speaking.”  Then he hit me in the face.  With a rubber chicken.  And laughed.
    —
     
    J.T. Whitehead has had over 160 poems accepted for print by over 75 publications.  He is a  Pushcart Prize-nominated short story author, a Pushcart Prize-nominated poet, and a winner of the Margaret Randall Poetry Prize. He is the Editor in Chief of So It Goes: The Literary Journal of the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library.  His first full length collection of poetry, The Table of the Elements, (The Broadkill River Press, 2015), was nominated for the National Book Award.
     

  • Hinting at Eternity by Bruce McRae

    My stars, if I may be so familiar,
    what’s with the silent routine, the timeless aplomb,
    this whole ‘distant and aloof’ business?
    You are, en masse, incorrigibly gifted,
    dripping with syrupy mysteries, and these
    suggesting inner depths and untapped powers.

    It is we who’ve endowed you with abilities
    never stated, and never intended.
    We say you are birds just released
    or souls or goddesses or burning sands.
    We ponder our existence as compared to yours.
    We dabble in sophistry, just because we can;
    we who are instilled with awe,
    infused with the wonder of beauty.

    —

    Pushcart nominee Bruce McRae is a Canadian musician with over a thousand poems published internationally, including Poetry.com, Rattle and The North American Review. A new book has just been released, An Unbecoming Fit Of Frenzy, and his first book, The So-Called Sonnets, and both are available on Amazon. To see and hear more poems go to ‘BruceMcRaePoetry’ on YouTube.

     

     

  • Seeing a Picture of 2 Guys I Knew 40 Years Ago by Jeanne DeLarm-Neri

    I knew them like fluid,
    like we were all connected,
    linked by our roaming molecules,
    like we shared the same skin cells,
    bumped arm to arm in sparks.
    Like cigarettes lit, glowed, burned,
    light one with the suck of the other.
    You could smoke in the diner then,
    and at night we sat in a bar
    which burned down last year.
    Drinks included crème de menthe.
    Its sweet child body slipped down cool
    and came up hot and undigested,
    baby puke, no bits of stomach lining,
    no pieces of the pulmonary system.
    Though as I inspect the picture of these two,
    slender, hair to the shoulders,
    dressed in chinos and moccasins,
    one smiling under a mustache
    and the other worried, keys in hand,
    I believe that a cardiologist
    may detect a nick or two
    missing from my aorta—
    pieces of me left behind
    on an Ohio lawn, should a machine
    be invented that could measure
    the weight of a moment lost.

    —

    Though Jeanne DeLarm-Neri has written poetry and stories for her entire life, she also earns a living in other fields, particularly as a bookkeeper at a private school, and as a vendor of antiques. Her poems and short fiction have been published in two anthologies (In Gilded Frame 2013 and Poems Of The Super-Moon, 2015), and several literary journals, one of which, Slipstream, nominated a poem for the Pushcart Prize. In 2014 and 2015 she was a contributor at the  Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She’s currently working on a book of poems and a novel.

  • Sister Earthworm by David P. Miller

    An earthworm breaches the surface
    of the pitched hillside where a boy
    sits, knees up, sneakers braced
    against a grass-stained slide
    to the street. The creature stops
    the boy’s breath, not from fright
    but from greeting. Child zoologist,
    his glass-jarred toad dreams in alcohol.
    A real cat’s skull from a specimen
    catalog reigns on the shelf. Today
    the surge of a worm to his side.

    The boy runs to his room
    knowing this joy could be written.
    Some exact words about sister earthworm.
    Grasping pencil, he turns into a child
    too consciously thinking himself as a child
    inspired to write what a child
    would write if a child were inspired.
    He gapes at the paper. Writes nothing.
    Goes back outside.

    For five decades he wonders what he could say
    for a single stray earthworm in spring,
    unaware of him, both above ground
    in the shade.

    —
    David P. Miller’s chapbook, The Afterimages, was published in 2014 by Červená Barva Press. His poems have appeared in publications including Meat for Tea, Ibbetson Street, Painters and Poets, Fox Chase Review, Wilderness House Literary Review, Autumn Sky Poetry Daily, Oddball Magazine, Muddy River Poetry Review, and Incessant Pipe.

     

     

     

     

     

  • Infinity Dance by Derek Piotr

    When you cut the root,
    thick and yellow from the earth,
    the root regrows immediately
    purple edged and defiant,
    fed by underground rivers
    and searching endlessly
    while April rain nails blooms
    sideways to the saturated lawn.

    In this you find the infinite,
    the mouth of something in
    something else, feathers
    where there ought not to be,
    a moment of dissonance
    bringing clarity to the dying
    elms, a single crane cutting
    the sky with its bowed wings.

    —

    Derek Piotr is a Poland-born producer and composer based in New England, whose work focuses primarily on the voice. When he has free time, he likes to write. His work with sound has been nominated by the jury for Prix Ars Electronica (2012), and featured on Resonance FM and BBC, and his written works have been published by The Broome Street Review, Hanover Press and The Newtowner.