The Zingara Project

Category: Zingara Poetry Review: Poetry Picks

  • Tear Down by John Sierpinski

    In this broad shouldered city, in this 50’s vintage motel
    we arrive to check in at the office, but the cigar chomping
    manager has given away our room. A pot of what looks
    like tea, but really a poor attempt at coffee sits on a single
    burner “hot plate.” Stale-looking donuts wait to be put
    out of their misery. Sorry about that, he says with a jerk.
    but I’ll tell you what I’m gonna do… I can’t wait for this,
    I think. For ten bucks more our honeymoon room just
    opened up. He winks at my girlfriend. His cigar is
    sopped. I grab the key, we are both tired from the road,
    tired of this guy. Walk down a few doors past a couple
    yelling behind their door. Key in the lock. This “special”
    room has mirrors on the ceiling that reflect the filth,
    shag carpeting up the walls, stained carpeting on the floor,
    a cigarette butt in an ashtray. The word kinky is too kind.
    On the floor, next to the bed, there’s a balled up washcloth
    Just a minute, I say and head off toward the office.
    The cigar-man is talking to a tired-looking older woman.
    They both look up. The room isn’t clean (an understatement)
    and there’s a used washcloth on the floor. There’s
    a moment of silence, then the woman says, They were
    only in the room an hour. I’m the one who cleaned the room
    after they left. Fatigue has bitten my lip. The woman
    hands me a clean washcloth. I turn around and stomp back
    to the room. This night is disintegrating into dust. No
    wonder the couple two doors down are still shouting, shouting.

    —

    John Sierpinski has published poetry in many literary journals such as California Quarterly, North Coast Review and Spectrum Literary Journal to name a few. His work is also in eight anthologies. He is a Pushcart nominee. His poetry collection, “Sucker Hole,” was published in 2018 by Cholla Needles Press.

     

  • My Sister’s Baby Blanket by Alejandro Lucero

    At a Christmas party, my sister left behind her baby blanket.
    We turned around and drove back through the snowy roads.
    My parents kept reminding her they would never forget.

    A small square stained with spit and mashed peas; it was no trinket,
    and my grandma, the party’s host, already tossed it in the garbage load.
    At a Christmas party, my sister left behind her baby blanket.

    If she were older perhaps she would have felt no regret.
    Perhaps she would have found another to save herself from the cold.
    My parents kept reminding her they would never forget

    the gift from our aunt who’s now alone in a pinewood casket
    and wrapped in her own blanket of roots, worms, and mold.
    She missed that Christmas party my sister left behind her baby blanket.

    On her last days, we brought my aunt flowers and unripened fruit in a basket.
    We said we loved her and all the other things she needed to be told.
    My parents kept reminding her they would never forget.

    I write these refrains, and think how my aunt and sister never met,
    about how their hands will never get the chance to hold
    at a Christmas party, how my poor sister left behind her baby blanket,
    and how my parents kept reminding her they would never forget.

    —
    Alejandro Lucero is a writer from Sapello, New Mexico by way of Denver. He serves as an intern and poetry reader for Copper Nickel. Pushcart Prize nominee, his most recent poetry and nonfiction can be found in Progenitor Art & Literary Journal and is forthcoming in The Susquehanna Review and Thin Air Magazine.

  • His Agenda by Peter Mladinic

    to place a lens before a leaf in the sun
    and evoke a flame
    to see a magnificent cottonwood green in the pale high desert
    to see a hawk on a wooden post
    to walk at night a runway where in daylight planes land
    to gather mesquite and lay it near a fire pit
    to strip naked on a canyon rim and swim in the creek
    and towel himself dry and put on clean clothes
    to put ice and whiskey in a glass
    to sit in a chair and open a paperback, Agee’s
    Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
    to fly in a piper cub over a canyon
    to see the green cottonwood alone in a corner of pale high desert
    to know the cactus wren is cousin to the javelina
    and the sun’s dying fire and wind
    and egrets white on the Pecos
    below fire-blackened trees.

    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.

  • Seas of Change by Marc Janssen

    For you beginnings are never endings 
    Every sunrise only rises, rises 
    Into the arms of a mild waiting moon 
    Tears are history, regret a rare realm. 
    No, this ship, my beautiful bark only 
    Arrives, it arrives, and arrives, it is 
    Never swallowed by darkened horizons. 
    But it is disappearing now and I 
    Can’t bear it, waiving glad tears on the dock 
    Is the most painful thing I’ve ever done.  

    Marc Janssen lives in a house with a wife who likes him and a cat who loathes him. Regardless of that turmoil, his poetry can be found scattered around the world in places like Penumbra, Slant, Cirque Journal, Off the Coast and The Ottawa Arts Journal. Janssen also coordinates the Salem Poetry Project, a weekly reading, the annual Salem Poetry Festival, and is a 2020 nominee for Oregon Poet Laureate. 

  • Dusk, South Baltimore by Deborah Phelps 

    Driving home from the old city row house
    To the new suburban home,
    I always twisted about, seeking out
    My old friend, the orange Domino Sugars sign,
    Glowing, a jewel, set in the wires of shipyards.

    Admiring too, the rose-pink-gold
    Chemically-tinted clouds striating over
    The Hanover Street Bridge, as my father
    Skirts the parameters of black Cherry Hill
    Apartments and Brooklyn Park decay.

    Such poverty so grandly lit!
    Rose-pink-gold stratus and sundown.

    As if Keats himself painted an ode
    On the storefronts selling wigs and steamed
    Crabs, a sonnet for the stinking
    Old-style bars, the front doors ajar.
    A rift of ore loaded into the abandoned
    Warehouses, their brick-fronts so colorfully
    Spray painted with the names
    Of those already dead.

    —

    Deborah Phelps is a professor of Victorian literature and Women’s Studies at Sam Houston University. Originally, from Baltimore, she lives and works in Huntsville, Texas, home of the biggest penal colony and fastest death row in the nation. But that is a subject in other poems. She has published a chapbook, Deep East (selected by Stephen Dunn) and in many journals, including Southern Poetry Review, Spoon River Review, and Verse.

  • Emily Dickinson May Be Weary by Rikki Santer

    of surviving as a ventriloquist Sphinx
    for novelists, filmmakers, memelords
    —& poets like me.  Spectrographic
    erasures bloom with threadbare
    secrets—Snapchat daguerreotypes
    in 3D flurries of foxglove crowns—
    posters & t-shirts dwell in too much
    possibility, while her jasmine tea blend
    boasts to rival sunset in a cup.
    How fresh can brandy black cake
    taste in the rewind of how-to-videos
    or namesake ice cream flavors prevail
    in the melting? Like her herbarium,
    collected & pressed dry—Emily’s
    riddles may tire—rickety dialogue
    slanting between spirit & dust.

    Rikki Santer’s work has appeared in various publications including Ms. Magazine, Poetry East, Margie, Hotel Amerika, The American Journal of Poetry, Slab, Crab Orchard Review, RHINO, Grimm, Slipstream, Midwest Review and The Main Street Rag. Her seventh poetry collection, In Pearl Broth, was published this past spring by Stubborn Mule Press.

  • Grief by KB Ballentine

    The doe stares until I turn away –
    when I look back, she is gone.
    No sound to tell me where,
    no movement of the leaves.
    Only the wind – breathing.

    You left like that.
    No gasping, no torturous sobs,
    just a closing of your eyes,
    and I was alone again.

    Now I wander the woods,
    hike trails where families laugh.
    Where couples with dogs
    smile and whistle,
    where music pulses with runners,
    invade the stillness of this place,
    where once we towed
    our own kids and dogs.

    The dream, the reverie
    that comes from silence, I need.
    When summer sun sears
    through canopies of green,
    when heat hazes the path –
    a shimmer – where I can see
    a hind leg, a hoof – you–
    appear in the shadows.

    KB Ballentine’s sixth collection, The Light Tears Loose, appeared last summer with Blue Light Press. Published in Crab Orchard Review and Haight-Ashbury Literary Journal, among others. Her work also appears in anthologies including In Plein Air (2017) and Carrying the Branch: Poets in Search of Peace (2017). Learn more at www.kbballentine.com.

  • First Death by Denise Low

    after “The Dormition and Assumption of the Virgin” by Fra Angelico

    Behind us lie halls of crucifixes. Bloody Jesuses
    contort. Faceless gilt saints
    adore Him.

    No one  has told me about death or sex. I’m too young
    but the museum displays the gamut.
    Thank you

    Fra Angelica for the prone Virgin Mary,
    hands folded in prayer, no wounds,
    beautifully

    haloed as disciples bathe her corpse. Above float
    winged handmaidens kneeling under
    golden glow.

    They dance from dormition into ballet swoons.
    On a stage of molten light they circle
    double Marys.

    How I wish to enter stage among pastel flowers
    jeté past shadowy Harpies.
    How I wish

    musicians behind the Virgin plucked lute notes.
    This wonderland of jewels shines brilliant
    but deadly silent.

    Denise Low, Kansas Poet Laureate 2007-09, won a Red Mountain Press Award for Shadow Light. Other books include Jackalope and a memoir, The Turtle’s Beating Heart (Univ. of Nebraska). At Haskell Indian Nations Univ. she founded the creative writing program. She teaches for Baker Univ. and lives on Tsuno Mountain. www.deniselow.net

  • Morsel by Jeff Burt

    Forgive me, but as I type this to you in the early hours
    I cannot help but desire the cinnamon-sugar sweetness
    of the toast to slip from my unwashed fingertips
    onto the keys and into them, into their concussive shapes
    that mapped electronically now appear before you,
    I don’t want just the comfort of sweetness, or the butter
    in the bread that has been transferred to the keys
    that gives a satiation for having risen out of bed
    to a day that will be marked by more violence and injustice
    and the crooked making off with the honest person’s dollar,
    I want to send the stolen pleasure of it, the giddiness
    that comes from having oatmeal and plain toast day after day
    and then suddenly this sweetness, this lightness
    that no longer accompanies dawn but actually pulls
    light over darkness, as you have done for me
    so many countless days for so many countless years.
    You see only words. But let your fingertips linger.

    —

    Jeff Burt lives in Santa Cruz County California, home of redwoods, fire, fog, and ocean. He has contributed to Rabid Oak, Williwaw Journal, Willows Wept, and Red Wolf Journal.

  • Living in Opryland by Javy Awan

    Living in Opryland—the twang of guitars
    lulls through the night, from nigh and afar,
    sifting caterwauls of rhymes that plait
    poignant, live plaints cataloging
    mishaps, heartbreaks, pangs, turmoils,
    and setbacks—the spangled world is adverse,
    but we plug in and plug on like traveling
    showmen, setting up tents from town
    to town in Grand Ole Opryland—a downhome
    expanse, where ailments vary—each citizen’s
    is unique, stunning, terrifying, misericordious,
    striking notes all understand and sympathize.
    We sync and chime to the moves, the dances,
    the choruses, the improvised instruments,
    the stanzas of grief and vibrance, our tribal
    tribulations—always falling in love stumblebum
    with the next gorgeous person impervious
    to our pleas or merits till the tell-all song
    reaches double platinum—the roving sights by then
    are set on a starrier mate—hair more bouffant,
    figure more robust, skirts pantingly shorter—
    who can pen a lyric and tonsil a tune, pick a banjo,
    or bow a fiddle faster than the notes can be writ.
    Living in Opryland, we’re pursuing the grand
    scheme of harmonies that guide us by heart.

    —

    Javy Awan’s poems have appeared in Poet Lore, Solstice, Ghost City Review, Potomac Review, Innisfree Poetry Journal, and The Ekphrastic Review; two of his poems were selected for reading at locations on the Improbable Places Poetry Tour in 2019. He lives in Salem, Massachusetts.

  • 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.

  • 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.