I want my own closet
where I can
pull up a chair.
Rattle
my new
pearl bracelet.
Lick
my candy red
patent leather shoes.
Bury
my face
in the moth grey lace.
Without your sweat
stewing in every crotch
of your jeans.
I want to dress
in the wake
of my own
pure
scent.
___
Now in the dark of early morning
it all begins to come clear—
the spoons in their drawer slots,
the flashlight where it might be needed,
my wife still asleep in our bed.
We moved here from 7 climates away
not knowing if our transplanted needs
could accept the acid soil and the sweet sun.
But in a week the house began to live,
its faucets standing like Elizabethan servants
ready to pour out the water of many uses,
the electric outlets eager to inspire tools,
the heating here for the easy asking.
Taken alone, all this is not a marriage,
but begun in such a place,
like a plant in the loam of lust,
it aspires to more, and it finds more as it rises
into the air, the light, the admiration.
We water it with our losses, prune it
lightly with our respect for its future,
and cater to its needs with our own need
for mercy projected onto it as a friend.
—
John J. Brugaletta was editor/publisher of South Coast Poetry Journal, has had two volumes of his poems published, and lives in Northern California with his wife and several bears.
When the mother bonobo plucked
a parasite from her child’s back,
a small droplet of blood pooled
on the surface. Did the adolescent primate
cogitate, ruminate
over the permanence
of scars?
After nearly a quarter century
donning his talisman, I found myself
middle-aged & single, sitting
under a naked winter willow, rubbing
the permanent divot now encircling my finger,
with a new found appreciation for the term
deciduous…found it apropos in describing
my marriage.
I felt like a four year old
with a skinned knee
picking at the scab,
a child with chicken pox, powerless
to stop scratching, wondering when
the healing would begin.
And then, like magic,
while running my index finger
through the layers of spring pollen
blanketing my scarlet red convertible,
I glanced down to discover
the pale recessed flesh on my ring finger
had finally disappeared.
—
Shawn Aveningo is an award-winning poet whose poetry has appeared in dozens of publications worldwide. Shawn hosts the “Verse on the Vine” poetry show in Folsom, CA (www.verseonthevine.com) and has been a featured poet in Sacramento, San Francisco, Sausalito, Seattle and St Louis. Shawn’s a Show-Me girl from Missouri, graduated Summa Cum Laude from University of Maryland and is a very proud mother of three.
I will not collect the hair
from your brush, nor the nail
parings you drop in the pail
to cast a spell. You won’t hear
whispered commands in your ear
while you sleep so I can have my way.
I will not call the old woman
on the mountain who sells potions
and instructs on fertility. Though
she has ways to make rain fall on you
to restrain you. We’ll keep our vows
simple, neither of us bowing.
When we sleep we’ll stay on our sides
of the bed unless beckoned. I’ll wash your
dishes, you wash mine, and deep
we’ll travel until dead.
Neither of us will iron or be ironed.
—
Joan Mazza has worked as a medical microbiologist, psychotherapist, sex therapist, writing coach and seminar leader. She is the author of six books, including Dreaming Your Real Self (Perigee/Penguin/Putnam), and her work has appeared in Cider Press Review, Rattle, Off the Coast, Kestrel, Permafrost, Slipstream, Timber Creek Review, The MacGuffin, Writer’s Digest, The Fourth River, the minnesota review, Personal Journaling, Free Inquiry, and Playgirl. She now writes poetry and does fabric art in rural central Virginia. www.JoanMazza.com
“By reading and writing poetry, I come to terms with my obsessions.”
Another woman steals a picture
of our doctor from his office,
him cupping new babies.
She centers him on her refrigerator
with a Buddha magnet,
prays to him daily
over the ritual of opening,
of the taking of milk and cream.
In the fall she has a daughter
fat as a butterball turkey
while my belly remains empty,
the only objects filling
my kitchen, held tight,
an “I visited Wall Drug” postcard
and the face of a brother
like a rotting jack o’lantern
A year later, I bump into her
in a clinic parking lot.
She offers up an ultrasound
of her eye, points out the spot
they zapped her clear of a clot.
She cries out
of her one good eye,
asks me to pray she will see,
that her vision no longer floats.
I pull her to me,
take her in,
take her x-ray eye home,
throw her voodoo in the trash.
—
Cathryn Cofell, Appleton, is the author of two full length collections, Sister Satellite (Cowfeather Press, 2013) and Stick Figure With Skirt (forthcoming from Main Street Rag), and six chapbooks including Split Personality with Karla Huston (sunnyoutside, 2012). You can also hear her perform her poems on Lip, with the music of Obvious Dog. Her work has been published in over 300 journals and anthologies and is the recipient of over 50 awards, including the Main Street Rag Poetry Book Award (2019), the Mill Prize for Poetry (2019), the Lorine Niedecker Poetry Award (2014) and multiple Pushcart nominations.
Your life’s a better poem than any that
you’ll ever write. I feel that I should end
with this, but think that it’s been said before.
And now the snow (perhaps the season’s last)
is swirling, and the coffee’s working fast,
with Mahler’s Second, playing now, to rend
then mend my pent emotions; soothe, combat
the ambiguities that pack the core
of my identity. It’s sour-sweet:
catharsis, death-and-resurrection. We
all know this well, but I am every time
enthralled by it. The music stops. My street
is buried quietly. My reverie
will linger longer than this cobbled rhyme.
—
Thomas Zimmerman teaches English and directs the Writing Center at Washtenaw Community College, in Ann Arbor, MI. His chapbook In Stereo was published by The Camel Saloon Books on Blog in 2012.
In the fifth morning of their
Caribbean honeymoon
“Do you still love me”
she asked checking
a new swimsuit in the mirror.
“Of course I do” he said
and rolled his finger down
to a new text message
on the screen of
his smart phone.
Their honeymoon suite
flat panel TV (on the mute mode)
silenced the words that
ran down the screen on
Heidi Klum’s face.
And they didn’t share
another word until their server
came to their breakfast table
to help them sort out the words
on their menus.
Basil Rouskas
All rights reserved
Basil Rouskas’ first chapbook Redrawing Borders was published in 2010 by Finishing Line Press and drew favorable reviews in the Journal of Hellenic Diaspora in 2012.
Under
this starry-eyed night
holding firmly
rowing swiftly
propelling
across opaque waters
listening
to Mendota’s
language of the lake
murmuring
rousing softly
soon soon
silver hair
sparks the darkness
and his zest
won’t rest
until a kiss
has been anchored
reminiscently
upon the lips
of his sweetheart
anxiously awaiting
this summer evening
near the banks
of James Madison Park*
*James Madison Park is a waterfront park located on Lake Mendota in Madison, Wisconsin
—
Jeannie E. Roberts is the author of two books, including the newly released Nature of it All, a collection of poems (Finishing Line Press). For more, visit www.jrcreative.biz.
At fourteen
What did I know of love
Or lasting relationships
Only that my belly began to swell
With a baby
That I prayed for every night
My mother forced me to have it
Taken out
Taken away
Empty like a deflated balloon
I stopped praying
And I never risked having
My uterus fill up again
With life
I didn’t trust that a child
In all its perfection
Could be born
From all my broken pieces
—
Rebecca Chamaa loves to walk, write poetry and bake. She has been published by San Diego Writer’s INK, Hallmark, Evangel, Christian Women Today, The Secret Place and others.
Wind-rush, sky white, harbinger of eagles,
the tree tops enter realms and disappear
without me. Is there anything safer
than a speck? I am small as horizon’s
vanishing point. Witness to my self,
diminishing. Nothing to calibrate
such unmapping, this ever-lasting lost.
Oh road trip, I am in the world for seeing.
Here was a man selling two apples
and a box of frozen venison. Here a rabbit
no one saw ushered babies into earth,
her tunneling the soft leaf-wet soil
inches from where you stood.
Here was a death and a meal.
—
Rebecca Aronson’s first book Creature, Creature won the Main-Traveled Press poetry book contest and was published in 2007. Her poems have appeared in Tin House, the Georgia Review, Cream City Review, Mas Tequila Review, Quarterly West, and others. She lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where she teaches writing and enjoys the mountains.
Once the moon stopped seeing me
one to one cut her light from
between my thighs, I lost sleep,
tried on the word barren,
made jokes about how glad I was
to be done, to sweat at 3 am,
and hugged my children close,
examined the aging man
in my bed as if he had already
dismayed me with another woman.
Today, an older moon, witches’ crescent,
bobs over the oak, the dogwood.
I dance, a fool, under her weather eye
No longer one with one, a sudden singular I.
—
Wendy Taylor Carlisle lives in the Arkansas Ozarks and is the author of two books of poetry, Reading Berryman to the Dog and Discount Fireworks and two chapbooks. See more of her work on line at www.wendytaylorcarlisle.com
What did I know then
of the tenderness of poetry?
Head full of chlorine
and dripping boys in Speedos.
High school was elegy,
fashion and fractions,
spandex and goggles,
ass in the air on a starting block,
a coach who passed me in algebra
so I could rip 50 meters of watery space
in less time than it took to read Frost.
What did I know then
of the cogent of desire?
That coach should have flunked me,
left me to sulk in the library
where Eddie and I could be discovered,
flailing in the stacks.
Now, instead, I suffer the ghost,
Eddie’s rhythm a rock from a slingshot,
me a wild hare poised.
“You are a foreigner to yourself,”
he writes in chalk around me
and the young girls giggle,
this old girl too young.
—
Cathryn Cofell-Appleton, publishes poems, essays and emails to bad teachers. She has her name on six chapbooks, a CD and a forthcoming collection, but no restraining orders. Yet.
Read her poem “Fertility Specialsit.”
Thanks to Ruben Quesada for the invitation!
It is here, among the dust, discarded
books, some read, many not, plots
remembered, most forgotten.
It is here, behind the
wall, encased through time,
held by a mind visibly gone
astray with vision blank to
the present, not to his presence.
It is here, susurration into the
night, Russian accent,
speech thick, participles
dangle heavy in air,
suspended vibrations of laughter,
tears, love, arguments,
apologies, hellos, goodbyes.
It is here, among the rafters,
rattles her breastbone,
light, musical, harsh, scolding.
“Hear me still!” he demands.
“Here, be still,” she replies,
pats the warm space next to
herself, drifts asleep to his voice
as it whispers in her ear;
her voice urgent in response.
—
Ronda Miller, a Life Coach whose clients have lost someone to suicide or homocide, has poetry at The Smithsonian Art Institite, transformed as art, online, in ‘BEGIN AGAIN: 150 Kansas Poems’, ‘To The Stars Through Difficulties’, ‘Going Home: Poems from My Life’, and in documentary ‘The 150th Reride of The Pony Express’. She is a Kansas girl.
It is with genuine honor and pleasure that I introduce today’s featured poet, Devreaux Baker. Devreaux’s poetry came into my life when she submitted a poem for the “200 New Mexico Poems” project last year. Her poem “Red Willow People” is number 93 in the collection and was posted on June 8, 2012. In addition, it will be included in the upcoming print anthology.
Not long after posting her poem, I received a copy of Devreaux’s 2011 collection of poetry of the title. It didn’t take long for me to appreciate and understand why it was selected for the 2011 PEN Oakland Award. Please enjoy today’s interview with Deveraux immediately following her poem.
***
Recipe for Lorca’s Chocolate Cake
I worked all night on a chocolate cake for Lorca,
filled with light that does not know what it wants,
created from chocolate so dark it sears hearts
and fills minds with dreams of moon and water.
I used cocoa so pure it causes policemen to weep.
I filled the layers with white linen afternoons,
a hint of ginger and essence of rose creating a dancestep
that wakes your spirit to enter the souls of your feet as a whisper
and fill your body with duende, passion of the first kiss,
becoming a river of fire that ignites your thighs,
and sets loose love reflected in all the eyes of men,
women, children and dogs,
so that one bite of chocolate will rest in your belly
like the tender edge of dawn,
lifting your voice out of the dark rooms of earth
where you sleep, rising up like wind or stars
to encircle my body once again
with your words.
***
Tell me about the inspiration behind your collection of poetry, “Red Willow People.”Some other creative outlets include performance art, radio work, and of course anything to do with being out in nature. For several years I produced a radio program of original student writing for public radio titled The Voyagers Show. Working with students of all ages to produce that show was some of the most gratifying work I have done. I also enjoy performing poetry readings which incorporate music and have recently staged shows which use live music and masks. I will be returning to Taos in September for a second Wurlitzer fellowship and am looking forward to producing a new book and a multi media show with several other artists (as yet unknown) from New Mexico. I love the idea of collaborating on a piece that incorporates visual art with the spoken word.
***
Devreaux Baker is a Pushcart Prize nominee and winner of the 2011 PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Poetry Prize for her book, Red Willow People. She is the recipient of the 2012 Hawaii Council of Humanities International Poetry Prize, and the Women’s Global Leadership Initiative Poetry Award. Her poetry fellowships include a MacDowell Fellowship, the Hawthornden Castle International Fellowship, three California Arts Council Awards and two Helene Wurlitzer Foundation Fellowships. She has published three books of poetry; Red Willow People, Beyond the Circumstance of Sight, and Light at the Edge and conducted poetry workshops in France and Mexico. She has taught poetry in the schools with the CPITS Program and produced the Voyagers Radio Program of original student writing for KZYX Public Radio.
The Zingara Project 