The Zingara Project

Author: Lisa Hase-Jackson

  • Sheets of Rain Yelling Over the Thunderous Music by Michael H. Brownstein

    An anger within a calm
    thunder clouds against the sidewall
    and when the rain came

    a frenzy of hyenas
    a lightning strike of jackals
    the race of gazelles

    we breathed the rain through our skin
    gulped it down from our hair
    sloshed in it until our feet were swimming

    house wrens found shelter behind bricks
    jaybirds scattered into thick leaves
    rock pigeons danced against wind

    you can only eat so much
    let your arms fall like deadwood
    along the flood gates

    —

    Michael H. Brownstein’s latest volumes of poetry, A Slipknot to Somewhere Else (2018) and How Do We Create Love? (2019), were recently released (Cholla Needles Press). He has a Sunday poetry column in Moristotle.

  • Every Day Has Something in It by Nancy K. Jentsch

    Every Day Has Something in It 
(Title from “Everything That Was Broken” by Mary Oliver) 
 
not just the first glow of hope in the east 
 golden sky becoming a canvas of stone-washed blue 
not just birds who busy the sky 
 mindful only of the task at hand 
 
not just the sheep, the turtle, the tulip in azure sky 
 sun pausing as noon’s keystone 
not just meadows garlanded with daisy and vetch 
 fitted with thistle and cricket 
 
not just the creek bank seeded with mink and crawdads 
 and hill’s dead ash tree the flicker covets 
not just fresh-laid eggs that warm chilled hands 
 the scent of sweet clover spilling into lungs 
 
not just the sun descending through frescoed clouds 
 toward dusk’s invitation to lightning bugs 
not just platoons of bats heralding night 
 while Venus wakes under indigo sheets 

    Nancy K. Jentsch’s poetry appears in Eclectica, EcoTheo Review, Soul-Lit and numerous anthologies. In 2020, she received an Arts Enrichment Grant from the Kentucky Foundation for Women. Her chapbook, Authorized Visitors, was published in 2017 and her writer’s page on Facebook is https://www.facebook.com/NancyJentschPoet/ 

  • Ode to the Republic by Crystal Foretia

    How strange is it?
That I’ve known you all my life,
and yet I’ve never met you—

A world so foreign, yet so close to my own

because I see you,
when my eyes spot
green, red, and yellow stripes dangling 
    off the Toyota’s rearview
black warrior masks across 
    from my grandfather in grayscale.

Because I touch you,
when my fingers graze
the dashikis my brother wore
    before T’Challa made them cool
a crimson gele my mother designed
    to crown herself queen, before the photographer.

Because I taste you,
when my tongue melts under
fufu and eru soup
soft as mashed potatoes on the Thanksgiving table
plantains and puff puff
childhood fried to golden brown.

Because I hear you,
when my ears catch
AfroBeats played at graduation parties
    now featuring Akon and Beyoncé
Pidgin that Grandma whispers,
    from the corner of Nigeria and Chad.

Between lost plans and sepia-tone stories
I wonder how it would feel

to hug family I never knew,

to cross villages I only dreamt of,

to reach a home away from home

to bridge the gulf between 

“African”       and       “American”

    Crystal Foretia is a sophomore studying Political Science and History at Columbia University and daughter of Cameroonian immigrants. Her poetry was first published in Surgam, the literary magazine of Columbia’s Philolexian Society. Ms. Foretia serves as Online Editor for Columbia Undergraduate Law Review and Lead Activist for Columbia University Democrats.

  • A Corrective for Anxious Times

    A Corrective for Anxious Times

    A Book Review of Carol Alena Aronoff’s “The Gift of Not Finding: Poems for Meditation”
    Homestead Lighthouse Press, August 2020
    110 pages
    $16.95

    By Devon Balwit

              Some days ago—162 to be exact—my HMO offered me a free download of Calm, a meditation app. An acerbic, opinionated Jew, I almost trashed the email without a second thought. I had tried meditation many times and decided it wasn’t for me. I told myself I actually preferred my busy monkey mind, preferred letting it ramble like what poet Carol Aronoff calls one of the “mice in the attic / of old news and yellowed paper…” And yet—something made me pause—a global pandemic, perhaps, with its concomitant upheavals of every aspect of life—and I downloaded it and began to use it every morning.

    It took me weeks to tolerate the voice on the app, which I initially felt too cloying, too upbeat, too mobile—but gradually, gradually, I started to look beyond its timbre to the words being said, which I came to find strangely calming and helpful. Was I, as Carol Alena Aronoff writes in her collection The Gift of Not Finding: Poems for Meditation, starting to “Imagine life / without complaint / no matter what arises,” moving towards be able to say “…Whatever arises, I will / think, just so. I will not even want to not want…”? Such a shift was shocking to me, for whom to want is, immediately, to act!

    Aronoff’s poems aren’t written in my usual go-to voice. I tend to gravitate towards poets who are urbane, wry, and dark, and towards works which reference other works. But, as with the meditation app, when I slowed down and read the poems with attention, I found them tidy koans that rewarded contemplation. Why not admit that it is helpful to reflect that “Sky has no past. / It doesn’t recall the clouds / from yesterday…”? Why not consider “…The thin shell / between us … where we hide what’s / most precious. Where we break.” Why not rest a moment “Beyond judgments / of good and bad, / right and wrong. / Free of all concepts…” These are useful practices, especially in an election year, in a pandemic year, in a year of forest fires and bleaching ocean coral. Aronoff’s poems remind us that there is value in slowing down, in breathing, in allowing.

    Locked down at home, I, who have loathed the repetition of weeding and tending, have suddenly become a chicken farmer and urban gardener. Always appreciative of the outdoors, now that it is my sole arena, I find that I am looking at it with much greater attentiveness. Confronted by the scent and blush of dahlias and heirloom tomatoes, estranchia and clerodendron, like Aronoff, I am prepared to say: “Nature once again / has brought me / to my knees…” and to ask: “Where will my thoughts go when I give them the garden?” Aranoff’s poems reference the landscape in the American Southwest and in Hawaii—cottonwoods mingle with Kukui leaves and moonflower, geckos with peacocks. Referencing her daily practice, she teaches us, in the words of Emerson to “Adopt the pace of nature, [whose] secret is patience.”

    For a long while, although certain of the upsurge of joy I was feeling during this pandemic, I downplayed my happiness and contentment when speaking to others, not wanting to minimize the very real suffering of those less fortunate. In a similar way, I initially hesitated to allow these gentle poems to work on and for me. But what do I gain by such resistance? Why not yield and repeat with the poet:

    Without the need to label
    anything
    mind’s endless conversation
    is a flower …
    No need for misgivings
    or even for dream.
    Everything is
    just as it is.

    When not teaching, Devon Balwit sets her hand to the plough and chases chickens in the Pacific Northwest. For more regarding her individual poems, collections and reviews, please visit her website at: https://pelapdx.wixsite.com/devonbalwitpoet

  • Escape by John Short

    Pigeons in the chimney:
    dark symphony of trapped souls
    or distant death lament

    as weather mutters all around
    then through its gaps
    a spectral chorus on the wind
    forces me to move things never moved

    the brass-scream across old slate
    frees an avalanche of bones,
    dust, feathers and a chaos of wings
    exploding into daylight –

    they circle the room, collide with walls
    then settle on the highest shelf.

    I ponder the world’s misfortunes,
    how we suffer mostly
    but how sometimes we escape.

    —

    John Short lives in Liverpool and studied Creative Writing at Liverpool university. A previous contributor to Zingara Poetry Review, he’s appeared recently in Kissing Dynamite, One Hand Clapping and The Lake. His pamphlet Unknown Territory (Black Light Engine Room) was published in June. He blogs occasionally at Tsarkoverse.

  • Purple Vest by Peter Mladinic

    I had a job interview with a man with a purple vest
    in a city of lakes
    a city where in winter
    the temperature drops to twenty below
    a man who could afford a down jacket
    a garage
    a man with a moustache
    and whose surname of three syllables
    is similar to mine
    he wore a purple vest
    and a tie that at the time
    impressed me
    I described it in a sentence
    in a notebook I lost
    while moving from one part of the country
    to another, a smaller city
    on whose outskirts kudzu
    had engulfed tall trees
    I left my down jacket
    in the city
    where I’d sat across from Mr. M
    in his purple vest
    who asked about my employment record
    giving me papers with blank spaces
    and a pen to fill those spaces
    with details about what I’d done
    and might do

    —

    Peter Mladinic has published three books of poetry: Lost in Lea, Dressed for Winter, and Falling Awake in Lovington, all with the Lea County Museum Press.  He lives in Hobbs, New Mexico.

     

  • Study of an Orange by Diana Rosen

    The basket of fresh-picked oranges
    a nest of hardened pockmarked yolks
    buffed to an acceptable smoothness
    sits docile, waiting, fragrant with
    that sweet acid burst that draws you
    to pull off one stubborn leaf-dotted stem.
    Its spicy spray tickles your nose, rains.
    on your beard, smarts your eyes, still
    you keep tearing away the thick skin,
    scraping off the soft bitter pith
    to expose each plump section
    ready for your lips
    small expectant lips
    hidden under a snowy mustache
    wonderful lips
    that open slightly,
    give me citrus kisses
    my happy tongue
    licks into a smile.

    —

    Diana Rosen has published poetry in RATTLE, Existere Journal of Arts & Literature, Poetry Super Highway, As It Ought to be Magazine, among others. Redbird Chapbooks will publish her forthcoming hybrid of poetry and flash, Love & Irony. To read more of her fiction and nonfiction, please visit www.authory.com/dianarosen

  • Autumn Elegy by Ginger Dehlinger

    Sól rises late
    on fields scorched sallow,
    weeds furred in frost.

    October’s metamorphosis
    ignites a red-orange wildfire
    in the treetops.
    It spreads to the undergrowth,
    curls the tongues of ferns,
    emblazons the carpet.

    The season’s gathering rust
    sends wild things for cover.
    Maples bleed
    before winter’s breath
    stiffens their bones.

    All too soon the leaf piles vanish
    in wisps of smoke
    from gasping funeral pyres.
    A cold shudder of wind
    stirs dust in the creek bed
    and the sun sets too soon.

    —

    Ginger Dehlinger writes in multiple genres. Although better known for her novels Brute Heart and Never Done, her poetry and short stories have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including the 2019 Zingara Poetry Review Mother’s Day issue. You can find her in Bend, Oregon or at www.gdehlinger.blogspot.com

  • Painting Itself Red by Kim Baker

    The job of the poet is to render the world – to see it and report it without loss, without perversion. No poet ever talks about feelings. Only sentimental people do. 

    ~Mark Van Doren 

    Everything here is red,
    adorning scores of farmhouses, barns, and doors.
    The Wandering Moose Café and train station.
    The post office and Stage Coach Tavern.

    I wonder about a town that paints itself red.
    Insinuates a crimson theology in an indomitable land
    of evergreen groves, gray stone walls, and
    the righteous white of every Congregational Church.
    Perhaps the inhabitants strayed away 
    from shades of specters and blending in 
    when Dr. Dean built Red Mill in 1750.
    Maybe they needed cerise to rival the Gold family
    or hollyhock to stand out up on Cream Hill.
    In some towns, maybe red is a fetish,
    the iconic covered bridge representing everything.

    I compose on one of the many red benches
    spread here along the Housatonic River,
    perfect places for poets and other lovers,
    searching for an unsentimental shade.
    The cardinal gone from the maple tree.
    The wheelbarrow waiting for spring.
    The brick of my heart.

    —

    When she isn’t writing poetry about big hair and Elvis, Kim Baker works to end hunger and violence against women. A poet, playwright, photographer, and NPR essayist, Kim publishes and edits Word Soup, an online poetry journal (currently on hiatus) that donates 100% of submission fees to food banks. Kim’s chapbook of poetry, Under the Influence:  Musings about Poems and Paintings, is available from Finishing Line Press.      

  • Eyes Fastened with Poems by Lois Marie Harrod

    Made thing, mad thing
    mud and muddied thing—
    how hard the poem works

    shaping its ship of clay,
    what is there to discover?
    Sails aghast

    but still trying
    to suck life
    into the little vessel,

    shale becomes slate.
    Well, take up your chalk
    and walk.

    —

    Lois Marie Harrod’s 17th collection Woman was published by Blue Lyra in February 2020. Her Nightmares of the Minor Poet appeared in June 2016 from Five Oaks; her chapbook And She Took the Heart appeared in January 2016; Fragments from the Biography of Nemesis (Cherry Grove Press) and the chapbook How Marlene Mae Longs for Truth (Dancing Girl Press) appeared in 2013. A Dodge poet, she is published in literary journals and online ezines from American Poetry Review to Zone 3. She teaches at the Evergreen Forum in Princeton. Links to her online work www.loismarieharrod.org

     

  • In Step with Desire by Margaret Randall

    I always asked questions of the poem,
    sometimes even glimpsed an answer
    flying off to nurse its broken wing.

    Certainty lived between folds of skin:
    bright light, or shadow deep
    as a black hole in a distant universe.

    I measured distance in layers of color
    applied with a heavy brush,
    held escape in a tight fist.

    But in this, my ninth decade, I choke
    on those questions: warm milk
    promising what it cannot deliver.

    Place is change, cold monuments
    stand where love once promised
    to conquer all.

    Entitlement begs to borrow a harness
    made of melting ice
    tethered to this broken dawn.

    My map dissolves beneath storm clouds
    as I run between canyon walls
    pressing against my wanting.

    Each image struggles to find its way
    across a quartered landscape
    of memory unbound.

    Today’s questions boomerang,
    mock my practiced attempts
    to pin them to conviction.

    Uncertainty moves through my arteries
    calling my name in the minor key
    of ancestral catch and release.

    But not that uncertainty. Not that one.
    Some truths never die:
    in step, as they are, with desire.

    —

    Margaret Randall is a poet, essayist, translator and performer living in New Mexico. Her most recent poetry collection is Starfish on a Beach: Pandemic Poems, and her memoir, I Never Left Home: Poet, Feminist, Revolutionary was released by Duke University Press in March 2020. “In Step with Desire” will be featured in Randall’s forthcoming collection, Out of Violence Into Poetry, to be published by Wings Press in 2021.

     

  • Just a Snap by Kitty Jospé

    unmarked country road near Piffard (Avon) NY on Summer Day

    of rising blue hills beyond the fingered bones
    of a dead tree
                   and off to the right an old red truck perched
    by a fence in the tall grasses, with its hood up, as a dirt road
    climbs by to pass it.

    It’s just a framed moment of a chance look—
    a possible diagonal conversation between an abandoned truck
    and shattered tree branches to the bottom left

                   or perhaps that splintered rubble
    of branches would prefer reassuring the shadow of a small unseen tree
    it won’t meet the fate that felled its parent trunk.

    In just a chance snap,
                   opportunities to imagine what could have been,

    the mind wondering if it’s fair to ascribe abandoned
    to that truck, and how many heartbeats are left,
    if any, to the one who drove it there.

    A snap of a moment, a shot
    caught in time, waiting for some
    stranger kicking down the road.

     

     
    —
    Kitty Jospé: MA French Literature, New York University; MFA Poetry, Pacific University, OR. She embraces the joy of working with language and helping others to become good readers of poems, people and life.Her work is in 5 books, published since 2009 and numerous journals and anthologies.

  • Squat by Gale Acuff

    I don’t want to die but I’m not crazy
    about living, neither, I’m ten years old
    and could live a lot longer, multiply
    a decade’s worth of sin and sorrow by
    ten and that’s a century of shit, not
    that good things won’t happen among the bad
    but I’m not so sure of that now, I got
    kicked out of Sunday School today because
    I asked if Adam had a navel, Eve
    as well, and that’s all she wrote – my teacher
    gave me the heave-ho so now I’m squatting
    on somebody’s headstone in the back of
    our church, it’s as quiet as death, ha ha,
    except for some mockingbirds and robins
    so fat they can hardly chirp and when
    class is over I guess I’ll go to her
    and apologize, my teacher that is,
    I guess there are some questions you don’t ask,
    I don’t mean that they’re bad – they’re just too good.

    —

    Gal Acuff’s poems can be found in such literary journals as Ascent, Reed, Poet Lore, Chiron Review, Cardiff Review, Poem, Adirondack Review, Florida Review, Slant, Nebo, Arkansas Review, South Dakota Review, Roanoke Review, and many other journals in eleven countries. He has authored three books of poetry: Buffalo Nickel, The Weight of the World, and The Story of My Lives. Gale has also taught university English courses in the US, China, and Palestine.

     

     

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  • How Do We Determine What Mars Is Made Of by Christina M. Rau

    Sampling and photographs
    over years until drying out.
    A flight of ages. When they go
    they go for good.
    They say goodbye
    and know the silting red
    will be dug up for graves.
    They know the shallow dips
    and angled hills will be
    playgrounds, outbacks, landscape
    views for all. They know money
    doesn’t matter. After setting down.
    The rovers didn’t need to
    disconnect in this
    way. They did and then they
    did not.
    In millennia
    it will be human bone in the loam.

    —

    Christina M. Rau is the author of the Elgin Award-winning poetry collection, Liberating The Astronauts (Aqueduct Press) and the chapbooks WakeBreatheMove and For The Girls, I. She is Editor-in-chief for The Nassau Review at Nassau Community College and founder of the Long Island poetry circuit Poets In Nassau. http://www.christinamrau.com

  • Hollow by Robert Beveridge

    Sap drips
    from the blades
    of pine needles
    that surround us
    as we lie
    on the Navajo blanket
    grandmother brought
    back from New Mexico

    the pine
    has been eaten by something
    leaves a crevice
    where we rest our heads

    a dry sanctuary
    from expected rain

    I carve our initials
    inside the shell
    before we leave
    surround them
    with traditional heart
    and arrow

    a first moment
    of love
    solid as pine.

    —

    Robert Beveridge (he/him) makes noise (xterminal.bandcamp.com) and writes poetry in Akron, OH. Recent/upcoming appearances in Blood and Thunder, Feral, and Grand Little Things, among others.