ISSUE 14 - FALL 2022
poetry
NOBODY LIVES FOREVER UNLESS THEY
die and get life again or the real deal
according to religious folks up in
Heaven but I guess I'll find out what's what
one day that's not really a day because
I'll be dead and in the Afterlife or
so they say at Sunday School but I wish
that when I learn the truth even though I'll
be dead then I'll resurrect and tell all
the people what to expect, that should clear
up a lot of misunderstanding and
fear and misgivings and so on and I
wonder sometimes why some dead soul hasn't
done so already, Jesus excepted,
somebody real I mean. I like Judas.
ONE DAY I'LL BE STANDING BEFORE THE THRONE
of Great God Almighty to get my soul
judged and He'll likely ask Aren't you the one
who took My name in vain all those times and
I won't lie, you can't bullshit God any
-way unless He wants your bullshit but
that's another matter so I'll say Yes,
depending on what Thou mean by in vain,
Thou sure weren't much good when I needed Thee
and we'll see how He likes that comeback--what
can He do but deliver me to Hell
for Eternity and I'm headed there
anyhow. Oh, He could make me live a
-gain, then kill me twice or as much as He
wants. Of course, I could do the same to Him.
—Gale Acuff
MORNING RUSH—METRO
I am sandwiched, feet planted for balance.
All these people and not a single conversation.
We are buried in cellphones and newspapers,
wearing scowls, blank stares, suits, skirts,
overcoats, ties, belts, lipstick, styling gel
earbuds, briefcases, purses, and ID badges.
And in the middle—a baby in a stroller
pumps her soft plump legs
reaches down with determined passion
and tugs off her right shoe.
Dad, her pilot for the day, can’t stop what happens next.
Blam! She throws it in front of the stroller,
a place he can’t reach.
The shoe sits,
a pretty blue gauntlet
on the drab gun-metal gray floor
at the feet of a scar-faced guy
in leather and chains.
After a few seconds, the guy bends to pick it up,
hands it back to Dad.
A wordless thanks, a nod.
L’Enfant Plaza is next.
The train stops.
Commuters rush off and on, and
Baby is oblivious to all but one thing.
Look! The orange and green stripes
of the tiny sock on her foot sing.
Off it comes. Down it goes.
Five perfect toes astonish the air.
Leather and chains cracks a smile.
The spiked hair guy with headphones grins.
The woolen cap guy with glasses, too.
Leatherman picks up the sweet soft thing
and hands it back to Dad.
Pentagon next.
Train stops.
Suits and uniforms off and on.
We are riveted now, the core of us on board
who know this baby’s mission.
Her other foot is calling.
The train accelerates. We hold our breath.
Off comes the left shoe. Down it goes.
We laugh out loud, and off comes the sock,
the last swift tactical snatch,
the final barrier removed.
Ten piggies do their victory dance
and now she croons and coos.
Oh Baby,
while we gather our briefcases
and button our coats
and step out into the cold air
to run or ruin this world,
sing that song for us,
the only one that matters,
that barefoot song
of joy.
—Mary Amato
CATCHING UP
We talk for an hour
about how you’ve quit booze again &
I’d have relapsed by now
if I knew any pushers.
You put down the bottle. You cried.
You went to a meeting. Is that enough?
I haven’t been to one in years &
would rather drown
in a swimming pool like Brian Jones.
Nobody’s happy, & I have a hole
in a brand-new sock, summing up a life
in which bliss feels broken.
—Ace Boggess
A COUPLE OF REDS
There were space restrictions. I was dealing with a hard copy, with finite pages. It wasn’t all going to make it, as much as I wanted it to. A lot hit the cutting-room floor, ended up in the trash. Still, I was pleased with the final draft, and I had reason to celebrate. I went out with a friend, a guy friend. It had been a long time for me. I was emerging from that place called “Dead Inside.” We wore blue and black, blue on the bottom, black on top. We hit streets we both knew. We walked. He lit a cigarette, a Red, with a plastic lighter, and I thought, “Fuck it,” and bummed one off him. I hadn’t had one in 19 years. 2003 I quit because I had stopped enjoying it. I had had a kid, and I hadn’t liked what I had read about the hands of smoke. Call it cold turkey; call it a process. Just like that. And just like that… the relapse. I’d look back later at this event as an anomaly, a blip on the screen so to speak. He didn’t light mine with his lighter; he handed me his cigarette because we had that momentum going. The lit met the unlit, and I admit I liked the way the ends mashed in a collision, the two tobaccos ignited. We were thin; we never stopped walking. It was a new dance, balletic, imbued with a masculine grace. I felt an immediate buoyancy, an interest sparked. I also felt an end arise to the anonymity and the lonesomeness fathered by my grief. My lungs drew in the smoke like it was the freshest air ever. You know what I’m talking about if you’re an ex-smoker stepping out of retirement. As we passed this one house, we, at least I, noticed two young women on an ill-illumined porch. They must have witnessed our cigarette dance and our joy because they tittered. I felt their smiles had our backs. This was the attention my old heart needed. I wouldn’t be going back.
—Richard George
NOT A BROWN BOY
On the news, at a slam, not from my mother’s father tongue
In a clean cut classroom where I raise my hand and am already wrong
Rather be called gone-rooted, menudo brained, a tri-tip of tree flesh
Is not my skin, is not my skin
O say the words were never summoned
Say the day never dawned on Tenochtitlan
Say the border never handcuffed the calloused hands of the desert
We’ve been messy kin messed by merry kins
O say that was my name
Say I never could be just me
Say we only fuck in color
Say there was a vision of a dog being kicked and killed and barking still
You never call a tree by the sound of its bark
We’ve never convicted a labeling machine
Say we did convict America
Back into rivers and canals
The dogs searching for the scent
Of a drunken judge, the jury screaming with chile in their asses
Or I mean burro, or I mean buried under boroughs,
Or did I mean borrowed? Did you mean burrito?
A birthplace of karma.
How many of us still need to be released
from the wound?
—Raul Herrera Jr
PLASTIC CUTLERY
There were times when this spring
swallowed winter. One is never quite home,
the way names serve for plastic cutlery.
As if I knew them once in a house
full of lessons and empties. These hooks
that brought me close to you feign other nights
now changed in me. I met you close to Holy Ground
an unexpected ball in play, and we had things
to say, the day I met you in a time of plague.
How exhausting it is to recall that no memory
is sacred. A car alarm heard in the snow
where the sun lit the woodlands.
This life that is never quite
returning.
—Jonathan Jones
LILI FREE ON SEVEN DECADES
Sometimes loss is a gift, emptiness
fulfilling. I thought I was leaving myself
behind. What did I find but a new
life in an old body that bears little
resemblance to its past.
Why stand on the side of the gravel
road as you point and say,
There used to be an old tree there,
but the county cut it down,
when you can plant a new one,
could sell your own walnut trunk
or give the seed away.
I’d be as happy to never see
my mother’s favorite frying pan
as I’d feel to cook out of it again,
would rather think about how people once were
than consider their current travails,
similar to my own, based in what
cannot be controlled, only responded to.
I want to move forward without
this heavy pack that carries everything
I ever felt or dreamed, my thoughts released
into the air to become the stars I watch at
night now there’s no distractions.
—Sandra Kolankiewicz
NICOLE INSIDE HER MOTHER’S LEFT VENTRICLE
She isn’t certain how she ended up here, warm blood pulsing, the steady squeeze of her mother’s practiced heart hugging then releasing. She’d been away from Mom, living almost on her own, when she’d been attacked on the street on her way to work. Stabbed, she thinks, and carted off to the hospital. A couple of days before anyone thought to call her family. By that time the docs had given up. Evidently her mother hadn’t. So here she is, tucked into a corner of her mother’s heart. Alone. But not. When her mother talks, Nicole recognizes her tone even if the words don’t come through. She can tell when Mom is talking to her, sometimes sweet, other times angry. She hears her mother’s lungs fill and empty, feels the pull of her diaphragm. A sneeze halts everything for an uncertain moment before the swoosh and gush settle back to normal. Glad to exist at all, she doesn’t mind being back here, but she worries. What is this costing her mother’s body? Nicole knows that bits from heart or aorta can wash into the lungs and kill. She doesn’t dare let go her hold. She is making up a song with many verses.
SETTING UP HOUSE
Nicole wants babies who will have babies. Wants a stream that loops lazy around her camp. She wants bees circling in her garden, returning and returning. She has taught the birds to sing canons, the sheep have chewed a labyrinth for her. Her step stones go down the garden and back up without beginning or end. She thinks the irrigation ditch works so well because she dug it as an infinity sign. She’ll named her kids Return and Echo. Instead of saying, the children, she’ll call them her iterations.
—Lynn Pattison
CHORD
A child is practicing scales at the piano.
She plays A natural minor
with her left hand, then her right.
In Kyiv, Ukraine,
a woman packs a suitcase. A map
catches fire.
A white goat on a shed roof,
a postcard dropped
in the street. The child
sharps the F, plays
both hands together, fingers curled as if
to pick up an egg.
A man climbs a flight
of broken stairs, his world
fragile as eggshells, as petals of crocus
growing in a Kyiv spring,
as flesh torn from flesh. The child
moves on to chords,
stretching her fingers
across an octave. Everything.
—Bethany Reid
RECONSIDER WOUNDED COLORS
Your irises appear charred
by a forest fire you ignored.
But I never grieved for them
before my own eyes matured.
Yours are not dead or greedy—
they are the Mother sleeping.
They are fragments
of warm hearts, noticing.
They are a wild autumn,
skeletal in curiosity, scared
of what comes next. I am
only now seeing your potential
for becoming fertilizer. I sense
your eyes will ripen to blue, in time.
THE NATURE OF BEARS
Stars deliciously harvested and away from cold, the healing claws
in the black of wood, misunderstood as bloody-eyed haunting.
Often, the cosmic gift, in growls, displays its stomach vulnerably soft.
In daylight it purrs songs of community and protection,
unknown to our homes.
We may hike endlessly on a mountain of starvation,
yet no dreams come until the bear comes gently.
Only then would we commune together
in those gardens of fear, enormous, with statues surrounding all.
They are painting healing hues...
not bloody.
—Nicole Scott
LANDING
You might not be coming home / this year / because of the coronavirus / Just last night the first victims in Michigan were announced / In the meantime you might be waylaid / I just left Indianapolis / where every avenue / was a different state / I walked from Vermont / to Oregon in ten minutes / In our hotel my colleague accidently dropped a slice / of pepperoni just an inch / from the door / I also left it there / because what else / was I to leave / but isn’t it / funny / The most exciting thing / to tell you / should not be the mild / winter we had / Does Australia have a coldness like / what we are draped in / here? / I don’t know / what kind of songs you like / but there is a song / where the speaker says their lover / is their home / I’m sure this is many / songs but I play it in the car / every time I drive home / thinking that I must remind / myself / and a place / that I am returning / Do places think? / When I say think / what I mean is / will a city gesticulate / its limbered arms / offer to me a collard / of its warmth / Perhaps the better word is / acknowledge / I try to acknowledge / what remains / put / Even your mother’s house / relocated like a kidney / to another body / is immovable / Years subscribed to new grass / the way no garden / can hold a single species / of flower / I want to say welcome / back / but I do not know / to what / What bushel of memory / can I barter with you / that might reclaim / the loss of roots / I do not know hospitality / except when I am sick / or just visiting / To call landing / from a plane / our respite of home / I’m sure you know this / Leaving is not like / the literal leaf / which withers as it travels / already dead / I think we manipulate / the wind we carry / and I can’t help but say / that leaving / means all homes are always / left / and so to welcome / you means / I’m sorry
—Liam Strong
contributors
Gale Acuff has had poetry published in HeartWood (2019), Ascent, Reed, Journal of Black Mountain College Studies, The Font Chiron Review, Poem, Adirondack Review, Florida Review, Slant, Arkansas Review, South Dakota Review, Roanoke Review and many other journals in over a dozen countries. He has authored three books of poetry: Buffalo Nickel, The Weight of the World, and The Story of My Lives. Gale has taught university English courses in the US, China, and Palestine.
Mary Amato is a writer, musician, essayist, and teaching artist whose work has appeared in The Washington Post, Mothering, Muse, Teacher, Cicada, New Poets Review, and many more. Her published novels include Guitar Notes, Open Mic Night at Westminster Cemetery, and Get Happy. She is the winner of many grants and awards including the Keisler Poetry Prize, the Maryland Library Association's Author Award, Utah's Beehive Book award, and more. She has been a featured speaker for The National Book Festival, the American Library Association, The National Council of Teachers of English, and other national festivals and conferences. Her own teaching focuses on the therapeutic value of writing and the ways that writing can help us to understand ourselves and others.
Ace Boggess is author of six books of poetry, including Escape Envy (Brick Road Poetry Press, 2021) and The Prisoners. His writing has appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review, Notre Dame Review, Harvard Review, and other journals. An ex-con, he lives in Charleston, West Virginia, where he writes and tries to stay out of trouble.
Richard George is a Tulane graduate whose work has appeared in Litro, Mystery Itch, HASH, Toho Journal, The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, SIAMB!, Red Ogre Review, The Bookends Review, Sunflowers at Midnight and Drunk Monkeys. When not writing, he works as a probation officer. He lives in an apartment in Asbury Park, New Jersey and can also be found at https://www.instagram.com/richgbooks/.
Raul Herrera Jr is a Latinx playwright, educator and spoken word artist. His writing is featured in Coiled Serpent published by Tia Chucha Press, Get Lit Rising which is the winner of the 2016 Silver Nautilus Book Award for young adult non-fiction and, in 2017, wrote Dante, a modern Hip-Hop adaptation of Dante’s Inferno produced by Tim Robbins and The Actor’s Gang Theatre in Culver City. In 2019, Raul was featured as a writer and performer in the film Summertime, directed by Carlos Lopez Estrada, which premiered at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival.
Jonathan Jones lives and works in Rome where he teaches at John Cabot University. He has a PhD in literature from the University of Sapienza, and a novella 'My Lovely Carthage' recently published in the spring of 2020 from J. New Books.
Sandra Kolankiewicz’s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Fortnightly Review, Galway Review, The Healing Muse, New World Writing and Appalachian Review. Sandra is the author of Turning Inside Out, The Way You Will Go and Lost in Transition.
Michigan poet, Lynn Pattison, is author of Matryoshka Houses (Kelsay Press, 2020) in addition to three other poetry collections: tesla's daughter (March St. Press); Walking Back the Cat (Bright Hill Press) and Light That Sounds Like Breaking (Mayapple Press). She has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize numerous times and for inclusion in Best Micro-fiction. Pattison’s work has appeared in Ruminate, Tinderbox, New Flash Fiction Review, The Notre Dame Review, Rhino, Brilliant Corners, The Atlanta Review, Smartish Pace and many other publications. Her work has appeared in a number of anthologies, most recently: Worth More Standing: Poets And Activists Pay Homage To Trees (Caitlin Pres, 2022) and Nasty Women Poets: An Unapologetic Anthology of Subversive Verse (Lost Horse Press, 2017).
Bethany Reid’s Sparrow won the 2012 Gell Poetry Prize, selected by Dorianne Laux. Her stories, poetry, and essays have recently appeared in One Art, Poetry East, Quartet, Passengers, Adelaide and Persimmon Tree. Bethany and her husband live in Edmonds, Washington, near their grown daughters. She blogs about writing and life at http://www.bethanyareid.com.
Nicole Scott is a West Virginia native with an M.F.A in Creative Writing from Lindenwood University. She loves exploring wordplay, mythology, and sexuality in her work, while simultaneously debating on another double shot of espresso. She lives in Maryland with her partner and two cats, both of which are probably aliens. Her poetry and other published work can be found on her website nicolescottpoetry.com.
Liam Strong (they/them) is a Pushcart Prize nominated queer writer and has earned their BA in Writing from University of Wisconsin-Superior. You can find their essays and poetry in Impossible Archetype, Rathalla Review, Glass Mountain, Lunch Ticket, Chiron Review, Panoply, Prairie Margins, and The 3288 Review. They live in Traverse City, Michigan.