Tag: #NationalPoetryMonth

or winter
and there were nine girls or seven.
Certainly it was overnight church camp
when we formed a second
skin around Lacy
with our fingertips.
What happened wasn’t a dream unless
a mass dream dreamed en masse.
We were one organism,
the skin we made stretched
tautly like a drumhead, lifting
up the girl Lacy, a musical offering.
Our song flowed in and from us,
all seven or nine, with Lacy the melody.
But one of us must have felt an itch
and discovered she was separate
and, doing so, withdrew her touch.
An epidemic followed
from this undoing until Lacy’s body
shared many points
of contact with the floor.
I remember looking under her
just before and noting
her two inches above it all
though of course that is ridiculous
because it wasn’t a dream.

—
Luanne Castle’s Kin Types (Finishing Line), a chapbook of poetry and flash nonfiction, was a finalist for the 2018 Eric Hoffer Award.  Her first poetry collection, Doll God (Aldrich), was winner of the 2015 New Mexico-Arizona Book Award. A Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee, she studied at University of California, Riverside (PhD); Western Michigan University (MFA); and Stanford University.  Her writing has appeared in Copper Nickel, TAB, Glass, Verse Daily, and other journals.

this body of mine used to be
all papercuts and scraped knees,
beestung summers clinging to our heels and sunburn blushing
across our cheeks;
you showed up to the picnic with bruises and I thought nothing
of it – clumsy boys will fall
as they please.
I never knew a home could be a gravesite until
you moved away and the grass overgrew
the porch steps.
I wish I could have saved you,
back then,
but we were both so far away and so hurt
we could never go back to our new skin,
to the blackberry stained mornings
when there were no broken bones,
or hearts —
only fireflies and cherry coke.

—

Max Reese is from Reno, Nevada, and currently attends the University of Nevada, Las Vegas as a sophomore. Max is long-time, self-taught poet whose mother instilled a love of poetry in him from a young age.

I sit in the audience
and listen attentively
trying to make sense
of what the poet
is reading.

I wonder whether there is anyone
who doesn’t understand what I write
I think not because I write very
clearly (or so I think).

Others may write about important
issues but in such unclear poetry that
I am not able to grasp their meaning.
Why is that, do you think?

Is my lack of comprehension
the fault of the writer or of me?
Whatever?
I clap anyhow.

After all
they clap for me.

—

John F. McMullen is a writer, poet, college professor and radio host. Links to other writings, Podcasts, & Radio Broadcasts at his web home, www.johnmac13.com, his books are available on Amazon (bit.ly/johnmac), he may be found on Facebook, LinkedIn & Skype as johnmac13 and he blogs at Medium — https://medium.com/@johnmac13. He is also a member of ACM, American Academy of Poets, and Freelancers Union

Today the dog is tired of me

and all my writing
poems. she comes
and sits in the kitchen,
with her tail banging
and a growling cough. she doesn’t like it; my writing
these poems in the kitchen – she likes walking
and going to the garden sometimes. she’d be ok, I think,
if for just once
I’d write on the sofa. she could sit up
next to me, curl her head
in. I get my hands under
and place her on the table,
hoping for some inspiration,
and go back. she grumbles to get down again
and goes to bed grumbling.
I look at her;
look at the poems
I’ve wrote, look out the window.
perhaps
we are both
diminishing.

—

DS Maolalai has been nominated for Best of the Web and twice for the Pushcart Prize. His poetry has been released in two collections, “Love is Breaking Plates in the Garden” (Encircle Press, 2016) and “Sad Havoc Among the Birds” (Turas Press, 2019)

Filigrees of rosy purple reach out
on slender arms of redbud
below the lettuce-and-grass-green heads
of newly-leafed trees.
Now my drive on pocked pavement,
huddled in with too many cars
and too much exhaust, is graced
with a quickly-passing revelation
of startling new life.
I never quite remember
to look and look, take heart
and watch the fleet hours
of jonquils, violets, lilies,
purple iris and daffodil.
It is the only time we can
breathe swift spring.

—

Carol Hamilton has published 17 books: children’s novels, legends and poetry, most recently, SUCH DEATHS from Virtual Arts Cooperative Press Purple Flag Series. She is a former Poet Laureate of Oklahoma and has been nominated seven times for a Pushcart Prize.

On feather filled pillows
he reclines easy as evening
crowned by a Cantor’s tower
castle shadows on sable hair,
white robe billowing
as if a cumulus cloud.

In sundown sky he presides
over minyan of five sons and wives
who sip sweet wine four times
with stained glass blessings,
children on shins a threshold
away, ask why in four questions.

Each year on the same full moon
he appears with Elijah, cloaked
in melodies at mystery’s doorway,
a virtual choir of crystal vibration
stirring psalms and folksongs,
midnight verses accelerando.

Like ten plagues passing over
a violent sea split in two, forty years
wandering to a land promised,
this family around that table
on a night different from all others
nothing less, a quiet miracle.

—

Steve Pollack hit half-balls with broomsticks and rode the Frankford El to Drexel University. He advised governments, directed a community housing corporation, built hospitals and public schools.

Poetry found him later. He serves on the advisory board of the Montgomery County Poet Laureate program and sings bass with Nashirah.

i. Sally Swinggood’s

With 1335 stores in the US alone,
the grocery chain appears to have set an upward looking
policy of equality in gender-hiring
which maybe is reflected in my statistically insignificant
sample size of a passel of 5 tall
clerks seeming to identify as She who are able to reach
the previously unreachable top
shelf to grab me a handful of packets of transfat popcorn.

ii. TransIt 

Closet
pried
ajar

gender
dissidence
unbound

post-op
posit
appellations.

HAIKU

iii. High School 

She tries to boysex
gay away — but it don’t work
— so then avoids them.

iv. Not a Mr., Mrs., Miss or Ms.?

Then Mx.-match fluid
trans, a or non-conforming
gender honorifics.

—

Gerard Sarnat is a physician who’s built and staffed homeless and prison clinics as well as a Stanford professor and healthcare CEO. He won the Poetry in the Arts First Place Award plus the Dorfman Prize, and has been nominated for Pushcarts plus Best of the Net Awards. Gerry is published in numerous academic-related journals.

A tube runs through his nose, down his throat, and into his stomach,
Pulling out anything he puts in.
He’s hungry but he can’t eat.
He dreams of blueberries and cherries.

I see blueberries at the hospital cafeteria. I leave them there.

I go home, to Dad’s house.
Laundry. Life goes on. Dishes. Life goes on. Feed the cat. Life goes on.
He has blueberries in the refrigerator.
Should I smuggle them into the hospital?
I leave them there.

In Dad’s dream of cherries,
He takes down a colander, sets it in the sink, and pours them in.
They thud and bounce into an uneven pile.

He turns on the faucet. The cool water rushes over their shiny, red skin.
The morning sunlight streams through the kitchen window,
Gleaming on their purple veins.

He picks up one of the cherries that had fallen into the sink,
A straggler. He dangles it by the stem.
It’s softer and darker than the others, almost black.
“This one’ll go soon. Better eat it now,” he thinks, greedily.

He drops the cherry in the hollow under his tongue then
Pops off the stem with his front teeth.
He holds the cool fruit in his mouth,
Feeling the taut, cool skin on his warm tongue.
Finally he bites through the casing,
Landing his incisors solidly on the pit.
His teeth scrape the stone, separating the sweet, fibrous flesh from the bony pit.
He spits the pit into a bowl, splattering purple blood on the counter.
Flecks of meat hang from its bones.
His mouth waters as he grinds the flesh to a juicy pulp.
He swallows, and the fruit slides down his throat, solidly.
Such satisfaction, to swallow food. Such joy. Such ecstasy.

He wakes to the beeping of his IV machine.
His intravenous nutrition bag is empty again.

—

Elise Barker is an adjunct instructor of English at Idaho State University, where she earned her Ph.D. in English and the Teaching of English in 2014. Her academic work has been published in Critical Insights on Little Women and Global Jane Austen. She also has published narrative non-fiction in IDAHO Magazine.

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).