The Zingara Project

Category: Zingara Poetry Review: Poetry Picks

  • The Road by Carla Schwartz

    The road of asphalt, still covered in winter’s detritus,
    the road of lined up houses that part for a parade,
    the road of school, of church, of aqueduct.

    I travel the road by bicycle, by the side of the road, the shoulder,
    my shoulders, a little hunched,
    my thumbs resting on break hoods.

    The road of large brass sewer covers,
    of small round or square plates for gas, for water,
    where the road dips and rises like a pillow.

    The road of potholes, of layers of asphalt,
    eaten away by salt,
    successive thaws and freezes.

    The road of roadkill — headless rabbits, flattened turtles, snakes,
    sparrows, and turkey plumes spread like a headdress
    in the middle of the road.

    On the road, I listen, keep a watch for glass, for dips.
    On this road, the shoulder narrows, then widens,
    my pace slows down as I ride uphill.

    At an intersection, on the road,
    metal eyeglass frames, squashed and skewed,
    one lens missing, the other shattered.

    —

    Carla Schwartz is a poet, filmmaker, photographer, and blogger. Her poems have appeared in many journals. Her second collection of poetry, Intimacy with the Wind, is available from Finishing Line Press or Amazon.com. Find her debut collection, Mother, One More Thing (Turning Point, 2014) on Amazon.com.  Her CB99videos youtube channel has 1,700,000+ views. Learn more at carlapoet.com, or wakewiththesun.blogspot.com or find her @cb99videos.

     

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  • Between Us, the Moon by KB Ballentine

    The moon aches, belly full
    as dawn frays the edge of night.
    In the shallows, a blue heron peers
    into the lake, patient as Saint Francis.
    But a quick slash of beak, and nature
    reveals her unconcern.
    Barely awake, the town unshutters,
    signs turn in shop windows, blinds open.

    And here we lie, in this bed so wide
    we don’t have to touch. I can’t remember
    the last time I knew you,
    when you let me look in your eyes,
    lean on you. What happened to us?
    The heron unfolds its wings and lifts,
    casts a shadow over the shore.
    The moon pales, day empty and raw.

    ~“Between Us, the Moon” first appeared in The Mill, Issue 2.

    KB Ballentine has a M.A. in Writing and a M.F.A. in Creative Writing, Poetry. Her fifth collection of poems, Almost Everything, Almost Nothing, is forthcoming by Middle Creek Publishing.

  • Internal Exile by Diane G. Martin

              “…we have no hope and yet
              we live in longing.”

                         Inferno, Dante

    I’ve been pressed between the pages
    of a heavy book, a keepsake
    to be rediscovered one fine
    day, yellow, brittle, print-stained—
    a sentimental talisman.

    I’m so close to every line;
    indeed, they are on me engraved.
    Exquisite shapes keep me awake,
    though once lofty, once plain thoughts have
    blurred, have rubbed their meanings away.

    The lack of air is thick with them—
    clouds of locusts on a rampage—
    these words elbowing each other
    These worlds of words, all alien.
    I distrust them–black, banal worn.

    Yet it’s not for nothing I’m named
    Diana.  For now, I bide my
    hours quietly, lie warily
    between famed leaves and string my bow.
    Somehow, I’ll fly to the dark wood.

    —

    Diane G. Martin, Russian literature specialist, Willamette University graduate, has published work in numerous literary journals including New London Writers, Vine Leaves Literary Review, Poetry Circle, Open: JAL, Pentimento, Twisted Vine Leaves, The Examined Life, Wordgathering, Dodging the Rain, Antiphon, Dark Ink, Gyroscope, Poor Yorick, Rhino, Conclave, Slipstream, and Stonecoast Review.

     

     

  • Notes in the Night by Judith Bader Jones

    A summer breeze, sheer
    as bedroom curtains, floats
    through a screened window
    and joins us in our double bed.

    Evening slows the rhythm
    of your beating heart when I rest
    against your chest and nighttime music
    becomes a cover for body pain and sorrow.

    Livin’ in this murky world – the blues
    dilutes our hurts while brush-stroke lyrics,
    sung by survivors, saves souls as we fall
    asleep holding onto each other.

    —

    Judith Bader Jones, a poet in Fairway, Kansas, has recent publications in  CHEST- The American College of Chest Physicians, Nostalgia and i-70 Review. She is an avid organic gardener and bird photographer.

     

  • Sleeping in Bed Together by John Grey

    You’re from a world where seasons never varied their routine
    and construction workers waved from beams on high
    and a revelation could be as simple
    as a bucking trout pulled from a stream.

    And now you’re with a woman, in a bed
    her body barely a shiver away from yours,
    suddenly aware of how little touch is needed to identify the other
    while always imagining the worst that lies in store for you.

    You got from hatching to imago
    with the usual helpings of slime and ooze,
    to where you’re heel to heel with the desired one,
    and yet still can be startled by such close companionship.

    You’re from a place where so little flesh went into the making of you.
    And here being fully grown is not something you find comforting,
    Yet from lack of light, a strange cadence emerges.
    low-breathing, low-flying beings navigating their way through sleep.

    —

    John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident. Recently published in Examined Life Journal, Studio One and Columbia Review with work upcoming in Leading Edge, Poetry East and Midwest Quarterly.  

     

     

     

     

  • as dandelions popped by Nanette Rayman

    Tonight, from a distance, I saw my real life
    smiling and walking across the avenue with bells
    on, a sound sweet—for her—like the birds chirping
    at the last moment of Layla. And without a sound
    the blue-green brush strokes of sad altostratus
    clouds crosshatched the whole sky. A cassowary
    lost its quillish feathers in New Guinea, feet left
    to kick anyone in its path and a fortune-teller
    heavy with turquoise in a long flowing skirt looked
    at me for a long moment. On the other side
    of the Atlantic,  the Isle of Hebrides took
    on sun and people cried, weathered houses
    tilting in the wind, and eyes hooded by hands
    ready to caress wives and husbands as I sat
    down floppily on an old bench as dandelions
    popped, as pink pansies blossomed fuchsia,
    resigned and overwhelmed as the human soul.

    —

    Nanette Rayman, author of Shana Linda, Pretty Pretty and Project: Butterflies—Foothills Publishing. Winner of the Glass Woman Prize, included in Best of the Net 2007, DZANC Best of the Web 2010 is published in Stirring’s Steamiest Six, featured in Up the Staircase Quarterly. Other publications include: Sugar House Review, Worcester Review, Berkeley Fiction Review, Little Rose Magazine, Rain, Poetry & Disaster Society, Pedestal, DMQ, carte blanche, Oranges & Sardines, Sundog, and Melusine. 

  • Post- by Joshua Allen

    Swamp grass and muck rot
    shelter a vibrant community.

    Brown-speckled wren eggs crack
    in six-pack nests beneath

    black bag tarpaulins.
    Aluminum can abodes dwell

     on shaded confetti lawns.
    Insects scurry on tire tread highways;

     reptiles retire to Coke bottle brothels.
    Father says, the lost architecture is the most tragic part.

    Glossy magazines woven into webs
    bridge trees as a canopy

    of dates and events. The focused sun
    illuminates the particular histories

    we have tried to leave behind
    during our marsh walk.

    Instead, we think of the cooking fire,
    the roasting meat, the hum of voices,

     which quiet as we approach, guns drawn.

    —

    Joshua Allen is a somewhat wayward soul who is soon to be mercilessly ejected from Indiana University Bloomington into the larger world. He has been published in Gravel, Origami Journal, Lime Hawk, Tributaries (forthcoming), and The Long Island Literary Journal (forthcoming). 

  • In the Quiet of Drought the Monarchs Perishby Jeff Burt

    The grass keeps on dying
    but never finishes, and what to bury
    dead ground in never comes up.
    A shovel turns, as if it’s restless.

    The soil warms and earthworms
    defect for a more conservative soil,
    the communizing surface effect lost
    when one has no soothing slide.

    Beetles that burrow for the loss
    of their virginity keep pushing dirt
    out of the holes and when sex strikes
    it is more of a match on a sandpaper strip

    than a moist bed of coupling.
    What does it matter—the male dies,
    the female swells and spawns,
    exits weary to become prey for jays.

    All dries, dies, withers.
    All the warbling birds
    and accompanying zithers
    of crickets and bees have throats

    and wings too thin to sing.
    My mouth tastes the dust
    the scraping rake brings up.
    I no longer water.

    —

    Jeff Burt lives in Santa Cruz County, California, with his wife and marauding bands of wild turkeys that scare trucks and cobble and gobble everything at their feet. He won the Cold Mountain Review Poetry Prize in 2017.

     

  • Absence by Inference by Duane L. Herrmann

    A row of cedar trees
    native to the plains
    and nearly indestructible,
    with a shed behind,
    old, ruined,
    indicate the absence
    of a home
    once in the space
    the trees protected.
    What happened
    to this farm?
    The missing family?
    The tragedy afflicted
    on their lives?
    And, the children?
    What did they feel,
    uprooted, scattered,
    with the wind?

    —

    Duane L. Herrmann is a survivor who lived to tell; a prairie poet with a global conscience.  Recipient of the Robert Hayden Poetry Fellowship, he is published in print and online in several languages and various countries. His collections of poetry include: Prairies of Possibilities, Ichnographical:173 and Praise the King of Glory.

  • Wanting by Diana Raab

    Wanting
    I
    Rainbow

    The rain trickles
    down my paned window
    as I stand up to hunt the sky
    for the stripes of my childhood.
    The more I want to touch
    that rainbow, the more it drifts away.

    II

    Persuasion

    When you wonder about
    what you want anew
    try persuading yourself
    and the answer will come to you.

    III

    Wishing Well

    Yesterday I released a penny
    in that deepest tunnel
    of darkness, crossing my fingers
    and begging for wellness.

    —

    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” was published in 2017.  Raab is a regular blogger for Psychology Today, Huff50 (The Huffington Post), and PsychAlive. More at dianaraab.com.

     

  • Geode by Beth Politsch

    The news of your cancer
    began a fracture – a small crack
    we thought could be patched.

    But then it crept outward into the multicolored expanse of time
    and spread gray
    outward from its edges
    like the matte surface of a stone.

    I’ve tried drinking
    to stop my mind
    from trudging
    along that deepening fissure
    that spans from month one of your illness
    to month twenty when you died.

    But I never manage to dull the sharp edges
    of your truths:

    You were too young and too kind
    and so imperfect
    and complicated
    on your surface
    that you were everyone’s favorite
    sister and friend.

    The pain is unstoppable now,
    and in this strange middle phase
    of my life, I have accepted it
    as necessary.

    Now I am walking with purpose
    to break the gray veil
    of your sickness.
    I conjure spikes
    from my heels
    and push them down into the darkness.

    I fall to my knees
    and my hands become pick-axes.
    I claw into the fear until it smashes open,
    exposing its crystal center.

    And this is where I find you:

    In this precious cache
    of mineralized memories
    you sparkle with facets
    both jagged and smooth,
    your light and color

    reflecting
    into all dimensions.

    —

    Beth Politsch is a storyteller, poet and copywriter based in Lawrence, Kansas. She currently creates content for Hyland Software and writes children’s books and poetry in her free time.

     

  • At Nineteen by John Sierpinski

    On a Monday, July morning, Julian Whittaker
    (at nineteen) works high up on a ladder, cleaning
    fluorescent light fixtures in the English lecture
    hall. He can use the money for the start of the fall
    semester. He wipes dust, and then black soot off
    the white covers. Mike Kessler cleans, too. He

    tells Julian, “I’ve just been released from the county
    psych ward, but I’m okay now. I’m studying
    Mandarin.” To Julian, Mike appears unbalanced,
    the shaky ladder, his exophthalmic eyes, the tick
    of his right cheek. Another student, Richard
    Longwell, has come to dust. He carries a boom

    box the size of a small suitcase. At the sound
    of the manic beat, Julian notices that Mike and Richard
    dust faster. Then Richard declares, “It’s break time!”
    and turns the lights off and the volume up. Distorted
    guitars splay, plugged in to simple chords. To Julian,
    it is too much. He thinks about how he has lost his

    beloved Renee—she has walked away. He feels,
    in the words of Pink Floyd, “comfortably numb.”
    He drowns another soaped rag, wrings it out by touch
    in the dark, and lets the water drip down his pant leg.
    He listens to Mike tell Richard, “Turn that damn box
    down.” Then Mike says, “You know, I had sex with

    one of the other patients.” Richard says, “When I
    dropped acid, last night, my entire body glowed. Just
    think about it, my veins pumped light.” “Look man,
    I don’t want to think about your drug-fueled shit,”
    Mike says. And Julian, he doesn’t say anything at all.

    —

    John Sierpinski studies poetry at the Vest Conservatory for Writers in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He has recently published in California Quarterly, Curbside Splendor, North Coast Review, and Indiana Voice Journal. He has been nominated for a 2013 Pushcart Prize. He has currently completed a collection.

     

     

  • Nook by Hannah Rousselot

    The closet is small enough
    that when I go in with my book
    my body is compressed on all sides.

    I lean the pillow I brought
    against the thin wood.
    The flashlight makes the shadows
    stronger, but now I can read about

    a girl who escapes and saves the world.

    I have nothing to escape from
    except the toxic cloud
    that my parents created downstairs.

    I have nothing to save except
    my own bloody fingernails, from myself.

    —

    Hannah Rousselot is a queer DC based poet. She has been writing poetry since she could hold a pencil and has always used poems as a way to get in touch with her emotions. She writes poetry about the wounds that are still open, but healing, since her childhood and the death of her first love. Her work has appeared in Voices and Visions magazine, PanoplyZine, and Parentheses Magazine. In addition to writing poetry, Hannah Rousselot is also an elementary school teacher. She teaches a poetry unit every January, and nothing brings her more joy than seeing the amazing poems that children can create.

  • Mermaid Suicide by Danielle Wong

    My skin ripens—
    a nutty hazel canopy of flesh.
    Cocoa dust and tawny
    muscle roasting, hot
    fire beneath the relentless

    Sun. My private vessel,
    suffused with color and
    plagued by a vain
    saturation, but draped
    in Vogue and saintly couture.

    The corrosion has
    already begun—
    hot blood coursing
    through precious skin and
    brackish waves claiming me
    as their own.

    To drown like this,
    I think, would be quite
    convenient.
    To wither away,
    via sun and
    decay. Ugly moths and

    fireflies are the only
    inhabitants of the corroded
    corpse where I once dwelled.

    Has there ever been
    such a simple decline—
    an ending more languid than this?

    —

    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.

  • Pachyderm by Toti O’Brien

    What makes baby irresistible
    is candid decrepitude
    held so gracefully.

    Wrinkled and sagged
    a zillion-year-old skin
    stacked on its tiny skeleton

    yet clear of all attitude
    only wisdom
    that of pretending none.

    Little beast, born a centenarian
    but without a lament
    totters by with unsteady majesty.

    Such conspicuous fragility
    grizzled innocence
    in its meek stare.

    Eyes black corals
    buried by timeless oceans
    submerged by rippling sand.

    —

    Toti O’Brien is the Italian Accordionist with the Irish Last Name. She was born in Rome then moved to Los Angeles, where she makes a living as a self-employed artist, performing musician and professional dancer. Her work has most recently appeared in DIN Magazine, Panoplyzine, Courtship of Wind, and Colorado Boulevard.