The Zingara Project

Tag: Nebo

  • 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.

     

     

    —

     

     

  • no consensus reached by Sanjida Yasmin

    four Fridays later, six
    bloodshot eyes confront
    eight boxes of hand-me-downs
    & that one house sparrow with
    the black goatee & white patch—
    startled by the shattered glass

    yesterday was about moving
    ten years from floor two
    to floor four—
    a good work-out

    today, the dusky dawn is
    filled with a goose egg;
    the fat house sparrow
    chirps a question

    followed by another starless night
    & when the goose egg finally sets,
    the sparrow & the owners lose
    pulse of the feathery momentums.

    —

    Sanjida Yasmin is a poet, writer and an artist who lives in the Bronx, New York. She splits her time between the Long Island Business Institute, where she teaches English, and St. Dominic’s Home, where she provides therapy and finds inspiration for her work. Her poems have appeared in print and online journals, among them are Pink Panther Magazine, Peacock Journal, The Promethean, Nebo, Panoplyzine, Poetry in Performance and Anomaly. She earned her MFA degree from the City University of New York.

  • A Classification of Poets by Roy Beckemeyer

    All those poets, with their delicate
    faces, the rote way I relegate
    their taut verses : Alluvial traces,
    Marsupial purses, Tightly coiled cases.

    Their animal hands, their angelic minds,
    the various cants of their labored lines.
    I draw from this strange sonnet’s brevity
    a taxonomic range of verse levity.
    —

    Roy Beckemeyer, from Wichita, Kansas has recently published in The Midwest Quarterly, The North Dakota Quarterly, Nebo, Straylight, and The Bluest Aye. His debut collection of poetry, Music I Once Could Dance To is available from Coal City Press.