The Centrifugal Eye Winter 2016 - Celebration-of-Poets - 10th-Anniversary Issue

A

of

In the manner of . . .

Inspired by . . .

The Centrifugal Eye The 10th-Anniversary Issue

Dedicated to . . .

Winter 2016 Volume 10 Issue 2

2

Front & Inside Cover Photography by Karla Linn Merrifield Cover Design by Eve Anthony Hanninen

Volume 10 W

I

N

Issue 2 T

E

R

2

0

1

6

a C e l e b r a t i o n of

P

O

E T

S

Staff: Eve Anthony Hanninen Editor-in-Chief & Art Director Karla Linn Merrifield Contacts Editor & Review Columnist Maureen Kingston, Jenne Knight & Mark Melton Assistant Editors Dallas J. Bryant, Gram Joel Davies & Ocalive Olaopa Mwenda Reviewers Stephanie Curtis & Dallas J. Bryant Art Assistants

Inside Cover Photo: “Papa’s Typewriter” by Karla Linn Merrifield …

See Karla’s biography at the end of her review-interview, pgs. 84-94.

Fonts: Display — High Tower Text & Hurry Up ⪤ Body copy — High Tower Text Stock Art, Photos & Spot Illustrations courtesy of Office.com

Copyright 2017 The Centrifugal Eye “Collected Works”

3

Poems written in the manner of … inspired by … or dedicated to poets we admire or emulate in a Toast to 10+ Years of Poetry, in Honor of The Centrifugal Eye’s 10th-Anniversary Milestone (2015) in Creative Publishing.

Editorial

6

“In Celebration of 10 *Ahem* Years…” by Eve Anthony Hanninen

Poems in the Manner of, Inspired by, and Dedicated to . . . Other Poets By:

Phil Wood Elizabeth Juden Christy James B. Nicola Rollo Nye Lana Ayers Nicholas Messenger Christopher Crew Steve Klepetar Nancy L. Meyer Steve LaVigne Linda McCauley Freeman

8 9 14 15 16 23 24 26 28 34 35 4

J. T. Whitehead Richard Fein Karen Greenbaum-Maya Esther Greenleaf Mürer Jessica Goody Lynn Otto R. L. Black Claire Hermann kerry rawlinson Siham Karami Melissa Carl Mary Jo Balistreri Nancy L. Cook A. H. Muir

38 40 42 43 46 48 53 54 56 58 60 63 66 68

Essay “Borrowed Poems, Inspired Journeys” The editor-in-chief’s toast to her contributors over the life of TCE

70

Poetry Review on Karla Linn Merrifield’s Bunchberries, More Poems of Canada,

by Gram Joel Davies

76

Column Review/Interview A collective interview on a roundup of poets whose books were previously reviewed in TCE

by The Tao of Poetry column-reviewer, Karla Linn Merrifield

84

Announcements, Books & Back Issues The Centrifugal Eye’s Contributors Index, 2005 – 2016

96 98

5

In Celebration of 10 *Ahem* Years of TCE Poetry

By Eve

Anthony Hanninen

We could pretend this issue of The Centrifugal Eye isn’t extremely late, and just whoop and holler over the New Year: Cheers for 2017 and the good things we hope it brings! But then, this might cause some confusion about what our 10th-Anniversary issue is actually commemorating.

So, let’s get to that, and skip any more apologizing, as I took pains to connect with all of our contributors while we were pulling the pages together during production.

The Centrifugal Eye has been in existence for more than 10 years, dear readers. We planned to celebrate that feat in early 2016, with another big anniversary issue, the way we did in 2010 to acknowledge TCE’s first 5 years. As many of you know, though, TCE’s editor-inchief — that’s right, I — stumbled through an obstacle of hurdles during the past 2 years. Each “trip-up” slowed the progress of every successive issue of our beloved literary journal, until the muchanticipated, 10th-Anniversary issue was a year late in appearing.

As of this writing, TCE has continued to publish fine, intelligent prose and poetry of varying styles for more than 11 years (November 2005 – January 2017); the editorial infrastructure of the journal was actually created in August 2005, so TCE has been the most constant and fulfilling part of my working life for even longer.

So, how are we celebrating? Why, by paying tribute to poetry overall, and especially to other published poets — master, wellknown, and less-well-known. We do this by presenting our contributors’ written works of a nature either in the manner of, inspired by, or dedicated to poets who have influenced their work or lives in some fashion.

Ready to party? Drumrohhhhhhllll . . . Let’s do this!

6

“Champagne Splash” by E. A. Hanninen, 2017

7

*inspired by

Phil Wood Living ~after “Living� (Levertov)*

Denise Levertov

The frenzied bees pulse their jazz through the sway of fennel, each hello the last hello.

The honeyed breeze hums hexagon themes, each dream the last dream.

That crazy bird chuckling on the red brick wall, feathers a jungle of blues and greens. I want to caw to you.

Each goodbye the last goodbye.

Phil Wood works in a statistics office. He enjoys working with numbers and words. His poems can be found in various publications, including Clear Poetry, The Lampeter Review, Black Sheep Journal, Dactyl, and London Grip. Phil is a regular contributor to The Centrifugal Eye.

8

~after “The Dirt Eaters” (Suarez)†

ocean invading desert — my brother chases the little green anoles hiding in the construction site across the street from our rock-faced, split-level house. Stop, I yell. Part of the word “lizard” lives in my name and my mother calls my skin tone olive, like my father’s drab Army uniforms, like the anole when it races across a sandy two-by-four, its green scales flushing to tan. It pauses for a moment, and my brother snatches it up in his small hands.

Ha, victory, you dolt! I win. He dangles his captive upside down for no more than ten seconds before the lizard scurries again across a board, its tail still squirming between my brother’s fingers, flicking like the devil’s green tongue.

*autotomy |ôˈtätəmē| noun Zoology. the casting off of a part of the body (e.g., the tail of a lizard) by an animal under threat.

9

Virgil Suárez

When we grow tired of our races, of ball bearings roaring in our skateboards’ clay wheels—

†in the manner of

Elizabeth Juden Christy Autotomy*

My dying is a rough sea.

In the ship’s casino, my daughter and her husband buy Costa Rican cigars, hold hands as they inhale the cancer that’s killing me, while in my stateroom, I dream of my wife, nearly six years gone.

My four-year-old granddaughter —she has my eyes— still awake in the cabin four decks below, studies the ocean’s swells through the porthole above her berth, and when her mother returns smelling of smoke and limoncello, my girl crawls into her mother’s twin bunk.

On the fourteenth day of the cruise, we dock at Mykonos, and my daughter and I sit in the lounge, remembering; through the wide window, we watch my wife, 10

Robert Dana

Here, on the Marco Polo, we smell salt, fish, a decaying body.

The wheelchair bumps over thresholds.

in the manner of

Spring Descent into a Dying Sea

with her 1970s perm, disembark for a ghost tour of that island to shop for yellow headscarves, gold bangles, and alabaster pears.

My daughter, too solicitous, hovers over my swollen legs, twitches my blanket straight, asks if I can breathe.

I need her to leave me, so I send her off with her child and husband to stroll the cobbled streets.

Let me know if you find your mother.

Later, a whiff of oxygen, a hit of morphine, and I descend into 1974, film my daughter, my son, my limping wife (clip-on sunglasses flipped up, eye to the camera) as they scramble, and I follow, up the marbled hill of the Acropolis toward the Parthenon.

11

Self-Portrait as Egg

inspired by

Eight girls, like the legs of a tarantula, scramble from the body of a house into the November night, one cradling a basket of eggs.

Aracelis Girmay

We are church schoolgirls out of uniform, prowling for prey. The eggs, so thin-shelled, quiver in their wicker bed. I hear them nickering against each other as we scuttle across the street and crouch, nothing to hide behind in this desert city but tumbleweed and dust devils.

I want to crawl into the basket, tunnel into yolk, warm and sticky, to listen to the secrets of white wings.

A litany of complaints erupts: the cold, the dark, a siren.

The eggs wait, patient and raw.

No one wants to turn delinquent, but Kelly hates her neighbor; Kelly always gets her way.

Somebody just do it.

Before I even realize my hand cradles an egg, my fingers sprout feathers, and I lob it toward the blue Ford Fairmont squatting on the street.

Seven girls, mouths tipped open, watch it fly.

A hand grips a sleeve, a wrist, fingers pinch a strand of hair.

12

“Painting with Eggs� by E. A. Hanninen, 2017

I spin through the chill air. I am egg.

The yellow in me sloshes against my skin.

When I explode against the car, my golden, bird-shaped body spreads down the door and drips onto the street, where I form again into the girl who watched her shell shatter.

Elizabeth Juden Christy is a freelance editor who lives in Zanesville, Ohio, alone with her cat, except when her art-school daughter comes home for visits.

Poems have appeared in The Stockholm Review of Literature and the Naugatuck River Review. She holds an MFA in poetry from Ashland University.

13

~for Robert

James B. Nicola's poems have appeared recently in Antioch, Southwest Review, Atlanta Review, Rattle, and Poetry East. His nonfiction book, Playing the Audience, won a Choice magazine award. His two poetry collections, published by Word Poetry, are Manhattan Plaza (2014) and Stage to Page: Poems from the Theater (2016). A Yale graduate, James has been giving both theater and poetry workshops at libraries, literary festivals, schools, and community centers all over the country. James is a longtime contributor to The Centrifugal Eye. Website: sites.google.com/site/jamesbnicola.

14

Robert Frost

I am so many men, and now again, struck dumb by the potential in a second, I squint to ford the mist, but make out ten divergent roads, at least. The woods are fecund with ways and don’t provide a leaf of proof of which are worthy, no less which is best.

Should I be affable, or be aloof?

Is silence called for, or should I protest?

And so forth. All that’s clear is: one can’t know.

Before the mist’s polite enough to clear, therefore, I tap one pathway with my toe.

In sync, the others start to disappear.

I step back, and they reappear. We go on like this, and it makes a lifetime glow.

dedicated to

James B. Nicola Frostbite #4: In the Mist

Rollo Nye is a poet living in New York. His poetry has recently appeared in Red River Review, Home Planet News, and The Basil O' Flaherty.

15

John Berryman

What a lovely view off the Avenue Now they will surely miss My wretched splendor, though Hell for the sinner Heaven for those forgiven Yet, I’m bored still By the life I’ve been livin’, so: Hi Ho Hum Down goes the stable bum I always thought Rilke dumb This is what I’ve become — Whisky, wine Brandy, rum.

Down and out Splash and spout I go SPLAT! And end Like that!

inspired by

Rollo Nye John Berryman’s View off the Washington Avenue Bridge

~after "Burnt Norton" (Eliot)*

The surface glittered out of the heart of light. ~T.S. Eliot, "Burnt Norton"

I If one truly believes in fate, then future time can be pre-known and free will is an oxymoron.

If fate exists then all time pre-exists, arrives in the present pre-made.

What might have been is an absurdity nothing less than perpetual impossibility.

What might have been and what has been are parallel universes that never meet.

My footsteps echo in possibility, down the path we did not take toward the viewing bench we never sat upon overlooking the lake. My thoughts resonate with yours, or do they not?

But to what end disturbing the leaves around a solemn space I cannot say.

Other possibilities come to mind. Do we dare go there?

Quick, urged the park ranger to you, kiss her, kiss her.

Over the bridge, beneath the moon gate,

16

T. S. Eliot

Reality doesn’t exist until it is chosen. ~Bohr Principle of Complementarity

*in the manner of

Lana Ayers BURNT LOVE

do we show our vulnerability, follow the official’s decree into our first affection?

There were locals and tourists, indistinguishable milling about, scuttling over dead leaves in the autumn chill, the thrilling, crisp air.

And a hungry crow cawed, his answer to the pungent call of discarded popcorn.

A crosswind rose, and the maples had the look of trees tired of being photographed.

We were the trees’ guests, inattentive and attentive, so moved by the formal pattern branches made, a complex maze cast upon the lake, a Minotaur detention center where down meant drowning, choked with algae, green-tinged.

And the lake was filled with corridors out of shadow.

And what seemed a lily pad rose ineffably, ineffably gleaming with love-sick frog light, And there you and I were, reflected, caught in that maze.

Then a cloud passed, and the vision erased.

Go, said the park ranger, for it had begun to hail, suddenly, exuberantly, with bough-breaking ferocity.

Go, go, go, the official said: populace mustn’t witness mystical occurrences.

Time past and time to come, the kiss we took and the kiss not taken, lead to limitless transient nows.

II Oh, T. S., my foggy, boggy mind’s a cloudy junkyard weather that with what odd broke parts it finds sings above its unhealing scars

17

appealing not to deafmute stars circling profoundly above earth but to man’s claustrophobic dance.

Configured with its abhorrent wars since the first garden debacle, that time your God unleashed us, that paradise was said lost; but a dance of chance and passionate intention, I believe, along with bold abandon, result in utter non-random human love that reconciles an end to wars.

At the unstill point of the orbiting universe. Neither mass nor massless.

Neither particle nor wave, at the unstill point there is always some chance, neither both trajectory and location, but do not call it happenstance where past and future are indeterminate. Neither up nor down, neither strong nor weak. Probable superstring, the unstill point, there would be no chance and there is always a chance.

I can only say, here is an electron, but not where it has been.

And I cannot say, where next, for that is to give it space time.

Subatomic freedom effectuates what we know of desire, the release from stagnation into action, release from ultimate and time-strained quantification, yet imbued with sensational grace, a quality of being still yet moving.

Bohr complementarity with no observer.

With nonlocality, a whole new whole world and the old, classical model, outmoded.

The complication of quantum solipsism excites and repulses the SchrÜdinger’s cat lover in us all.

Unstill, the unpredictability of past and future is the warp and weave of a sustaining cosmos engendering life from the stardust void

18

out of which our flesh emerged.

Time past and time future engage all of our consciousness.

To be conscious is to be aware of time’s unnatural nature, so a moment at lake’s edge, a moment beneath a gate at sunset, the first moment our lips met, wind tolling leaves, are part of the now and future now, in the human mind where time is made and mined.

III Here is a place of deep affection time prior and time since drain paler. Neither moonlight softening edges with phosphor flux transforming starkness into lovely flow with low light denoting sensualness nor brilliant sunshine to brighten the soul brimming the senses with bounty mud-bathing in nature everlasting.

Neither mass nor energy. A bonfire in the eyes of a fresh-faced freshman in love with love with loving him filled with exuberance, empty of experience excitement without containment.

Onlookers bristled, tousled by the breeze of arrival, departure, arrival winds in and out of aroused breathing time prior and time since.

Two healthy youngsters holding hands on the A-train platform, swept away transported by the wave of passion that breaks

19

across all five boroughs, Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx Manhattan and Staten Island too, even the outer reaches Westchester, Long Island, and inner-city Newark. Here.

Here in fluorescent glow, in this bustling underground world.

Submerge, submerge further into the world of incessant togetherness world within a world that is its own world, compulsory intimacy, circumspect and scrupulous with all belongings surfeit to the world of sense fodder for the world of possibility ignition of the world of the spirit; this is one dimension, and the other is the same, not in absence of breadth but in breath and breathing; unstill each dimension rides on desire, O, on its tunneled ways, all time prior and time since.

IV Sun and birdsong have awakened the day, pale blue skies that wash stars away.

Will the dog lick our faces, will the puss jump up, into our laps, baby of fur, nuzzle and purr?

Steamy wisps of fresh-brewed coffee curl up to us? After the shower’s massaging spray has answered skin to skin, and we’re clean, unstill.

At the unstill source of this stirring world.

20

V Light travels, wind travels over distance, but that which is merely matter can be converted. Light after emission reaches across time. Both by frequency, by wavelength can light or air currents reach the unstillness as a tree is unstill photosynthesizing steadily within its stillness.

Also the unstillness of the star, while wished upon, that, as well as the wisher, the consanguinity.

Or say that gravity bends time and space, and beginnings and endings coil around so beginning and ending become nonlinear.

And all is always arriving. Light waves bend and sometimes break, intercepted by glass, liquids, other waves, reflection, refraction, precise absorption, yet always light moves at a perceived constant velocity. Stray particles of dust, water droplets in the atmosphere always assail them. The light in the Basilica is most assaulted by fixed dark panes, archaic shadows beneath its oppressive dome, the echoing reverberation of patriarchal tomes.

The vigor of any system is change, as in I Ching’s sixty-four hexagram arrangement.

Wholeness is in itself broken not in itself whole.

Brokenness is not totality but rather a degree of openness, timeless dance of yin and yang bound to the aspect of desire without limits or limitation

21

between knowing and unknowing.

Sudden throng of hailstones even as the sun shines there rises the unheeded voice kiss her, kiss her quick now, at last now or never— ridiculous sad waste of love spanning past to ever after.

“Water & Light 3” by E. A. Hanninen, 2017

Lana Ayers is a poet, novelist, publisher, and time travel enthusiast. She facilitates Write Away™ generative writing workshops, leads private salons for book groups, and teaches at writers' conferences. She is obsessed with exotic flavors of ice cream, Little Red Riding Hood, and monochromatic cats and dogs.

Lana is a longtime contributor to The Centrifugal Eye. Website: http://LanaAyers.com

22

Nicholas Messenger (born 1945) had his first poems published in New Zealand as a schoolboy. He won the Glover Poetry award in the 1970s. In recent years, he’s had work published in numerous online magazines. He completed a degree at Auckland University, has traveled extensively, and lived at various times in France, England, and Japan. His many jobs have included seaman, security guard, and demolition worker. For a long time, he made his living as a teacher of science, art, and languages in high schools in New Zealand, and as teacher of English in Japan. He now runs a small publishing operation, Konuoi Imprint, publishing his novels for adults and young people, volumes of his poetry, and fables. Nicholas is a longtime contributor to The Centrifugal Eye.

23

Robert Frost & Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Robert was a rider-down of birches and he wrote a poem about it.

I don’t know if my father ever read it, but he read us Hiawatha.

And we had a lancewood at our picnic place he used to bend down in a bow, and while we hung on, he would let it spring back so we’d swing up into the sub-canopy.

If that’s not poetry, then I don’t know what else to call it.

And he taught us how to make outriggers from the sticks of flax, and he could wrap a smile around his pipe that lit the world from underneath, like sunlight running over a rippling creek.

The supplejack, the lancewood, and the sweet karaka with its decomposing fruit scents reminiscent of his detonating lemon beer — these are my father’s trees.

dedicated to

Nicholas Messenger Lancewood

into the current for Baxter to fetch.

And because he is a dog, Baxter does.

And because this is Joseph, he is trying to drown the dog, to hurl a stick far enough into the current so Baxter can’t fetch himself back to shore.

In between points, the players look up.

Joseph, leave the dog alone.

Joseph, if you hurt that dog, I’ll bust you up.

Mike, who knows dogs, says, It’s okay. If Baxter gets tired, he’ll stop. Stumbling back to shore, Baxter drops the stick near the blacktop.

Now, Baxter is coughing.

Someone picks up his dribble: Leave the fucking dog alone. Can any faithful creature survive Joseph? He hurls this question out farther and farther, 24

Mark Doty

These boys do time, 6-to-12 months, demolition experts shooting basketballs and cursing blue streaks. Joseph is throwing sticks out

inspired by

Christopher Crew Adjudicated Youth

for one hour, like any boy and dog with river. And Baxter does not drown, and Baxter does not stop. This one law Joseph cannot break.

“Water & Light 4” by E. A. Hanninen, 2017

Baxter comes back: yes — yes — yes.

Baxter answers yes.

Christopher Crew’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in journals such as Sycamore Review, The Marlboro Review, Natural Bridge, and Otoliths.

25

When the burning is done and broken glass swept and piled into a little mountain of blades and smoke has been blasted out through tubes, and sirens have quieted along shadows of road, some part of the air will hold the shape and echo of that noise.

In some corners of that place, darkness will never disappear.

Its terrible gravity swallows every photon with a hunger born of emptiness. Invisible, it blazes on.

Everything we own is at risk, even the sky, which sometimes seemed to smile; even green waves soaking slick sand. Sparrows flit into trees and gray hawks sit on fences waiting for movement along the rustling grass.

These, we thought, would last forever, but when the builders leave, night will come again and again, covering the footsteps of the dead, who own nothing, who travel in open boats, traversing rivers of blood.

26

Charles Simic

Pour water in a leaky bucket.

Strike two tears to make fire, And have tongues with bones in them . . . ~C. Simic, “Concerning My Neighbors, the Hittites�

dedicated to

Steve Klepetar Fire at Grave Lake

The mailman is late, not that I need him for my daily dose of bills and solicitations, offers of cheap loans and coupons for a hundred brands of pizza, but I miss his dogs, the gray ones who pull his cart through our street. Some days he grips the leash of a lovely white dog, part Shepherd, I think, part Malamute. I avoid him then, because that one leapt up and bit my shoulder once, not hard, but just enough to show me he could.

Robert Bly

As the snow grows heavier, the cornstalks fade farther away, And the barn moves nearer to the house.

The barn moves all alone in the growing storm. ~R. Bly, “Snowfall in the Afternoon”

dedicated to

Yukon Light and Shadow

Dazed, I’d wandered to the footbridge over the river where kids gather on summer nights to smoke dope.

I stared at the water, cool and green as it wound through the leafing trees. After a while, I edged my way home past shadows and growls to find my mail neatly bundled in the box. Dog shadows were everywhere as I flipped open the bin, offering my trembling hand to that blue plastic maw.

Steve Klepetar’s work has appeared worldwide, in such journals as Boston Literary Magazine, Chiron Review, Deep Water Literary Journal, EXPOUND, Phenomenal Literature, Red River Review, Snakeskin, Voices Israel Poetry, Ygdrasil: A Journal of the Poetic Arts, and many others. Recent collections include My Son Writes a Report on the Warsaw Ghetto and The Li Bo Poems, both from Flutter Press. His latest, Family Reunion (Big Table Publishing), is forthcoming.

27

Nancy L. Meyer

Querido Sr. Neruda ,

dedicated to

You claim, My poems haven’t eaten poems . . .

I confess, my poems have eaten yours; my tongue demanded it.

Pablo Neruda

Climbing the stairs at La Chascona, my mouth watered among the slippers and blades of your garden.

Out your blue-roomed window, I inhaled their compost tang.

I sat on squat red chairs in the kitchen and gnawed your earthly moon.

My eyes rose to shelves of Aymara herbs, silver crafted by the Mapuche.

Your feast— the curves and patience 28

of your peoples, you lined them up, hung them over doorways.

Even the yellow bird, you took.

Your study, silent without you, everything dead.

Then alive, your jackstraw jumble wakes me 3:00 AM, waves frothing green whales, parsley, pigs at dawn.

I’m eating your poems.

Some morsel might catapult me.

I’m not ashamed.

After Stalin I can imagine the disinhabited woman emptied of dreams.

My mother, a crusader like you, sat on the floor and cried.

29

But you gave us the onion brooding in the dark, its nose-clearing smell, green arms raised.

You uncovered its astral seed.

I can’t let go of the stone in your pocket, the simple walk home.

You, sunk in deep leather, your arms on the wooden arms.

Rolling over and over on my tongue, these words Poetry is white— all you never said.

Con Cuidado, NM Author’s Note: All words in italics above are from Neruda’s poems in the Full Woman, Fleshly Apple, Hot Moon collection.

30

~after “How You Might Approach a Foal� (Videlock)*

Wendy Videlock

like a mistral, like an eagle, like you

*in the manner of

How Might You Uncover a Nest?

are part tide and part sunrise, like look here! like you had always followed your nose or composed sonatas, like a controlled burn, like snowmelt, like your father wove you a net for butterflies you twirled as you ran, like you will always smell a clump of moss or the beach at night, like an astronaut like jackstraws like you are a wand.

31

*inspired by

Under Here ~after “Makeshift” (Bowman)*

My loaves brick hard, an old dishtowel tucked over the top.

My teeth wobble in the bone, fear to speak of sink holes, the tumbledown caped demons who fly in at night the distance between stars if you fall in. I’m dying under here, can’t you see? You’re dying, too. Here, under all, we must see it through.

In the fall between stars you fly the distance. Cape yourself.

Demons down, the night tumbles when you speak into its holes, sink your teeth into the bone of fear. Only when we untuck the towel, do the bricks wobble, loaves soften.

Warps old as the first steps on our pilgrimage 32

Catherine Bowman

I’m hoarding my love in a cramped basket, strapping tight each warp and woof. Clench the handle woven with knots from our pilgrimage.

“Basket of Love” by E. A. Hanninen, 2017

unclench.

We fumble for the knots and loosen, loosen the weave.

Our basket will hoard us, strap us in. Love love, love uncramped here and under.

Avid cyclist, grandmother of 5, end-of-life counselor, Nancy L. Meyer lives in Portola Valley, California. A blank page is her greatest thrill and terror. Her poems are published in Colorado Review, Tupelo Quarterly 3, Bitterzoet Magazine, The Poet’s Touchstone, Wordland, Kneel Downe’s Stolen Indie, Persimmon Tree, HIV Here & Now Project, Indolent Books, the Tranquility anthology (Kind of a Hurricane Press) and Pyrokinection; forthcoming, in Bitterzoet, and the Tupelo Press 30/30 Project chapbook. She was also a finalist in New Orleans Poetry Festival 2016.

33

~after “On Gay Wallpaper� (Williams)*

and on bare hanging wires not the thread of heaven but dusty bulbs casting dim shadows after so much daily routine a red carpet runner indelibly wrinkled with worn directional living what does it say that entryways once furred with winter jackets are now rows of empty brass teeth that on windows lonely rivulets rain with no faces pressed to the cold pane praying to any childhood god for the sun and on these walls not gay but gilt faint traces whispering here too was life we, the unremembered, we too have lived

Steve LaVigne is the co-founder of CU Poetry, a local poetry group in East Central Illinois. The group meets weekly to share their stories and to help make poetry a part of the greater community experience.

Website: http://stevelavigne.wix.com/mysite

34

William Carlos Williams

not gay wallpaper but sickly yellow paint once finger painted with whorls of raspberry jelly

*inspired by

Steve LaVigne on these walls

~for S. Kunitz, 1905-2006

I weigh the distance I’ve come, cauldron of could haves, should haves.

In January, August seems a long way off.

At the Dodge Poetry Festival I drown in sound, break through rain into the night air where people pace in the drizzle for the next poet — for words and a world we understand. Stanley Kunitz calls age, indeed life, passing through a phase.

When he finally crosses the stage, his jacket seems larger than last I saw him. He walks with a cane, his body a cruel question mark. But when he reaches the podium he lifts the cane like Excalibur and tosses it on a table.

He straightens, grows taller, and taller still as he begins to read, his voice louder than the rain.

35

Stanley Kunitz

What is the size of the rest of our lives?

There are those who hold age tightly, and those who spring up the stairs, laughing.

dedicated to

Linda McCauley Freeman Passing By

dedicated to

Airborne for J. Kenyon 1947-1995

open on my lap. I picture Jane in a green wingchair, its back crowning her brown curls, its arms slightly frayed.

Donald reads Hardy to her, “Ah, no; the years…” his voice hurried, insistent. She sighs, closes her eyes—the fire between them sparks and he ends, tends to it.

The dog on the braided rug at her feet doesn’t lift his head.

I did not know her, but for words, which do not die, except when never spoken. My husband, miles away in his green armchair —silent. I look at the people fastened about me: my bespectacled seatmate with his inflatable neck pillow; the man across the aisle filling in a crossword puzzle so swiftly he seems to be 36

Jane Kenyon

Fasten seat belt.

Use seat cushion for floatation.

The plane shudders. I close my eyes against the words, Kenyon’s Let Evening Come: Poems

just jotting the alphabet. His ears the large ears of the very old. His wife asks if they can share a beer. She wears entirely pink and a ribbon in her hair.

They are too young to die. Jane and I sit quietly together, watching, listening.

The engine whishes, air escapes, the jolt of wheels releasing. In the night air below us—

“Necklace of Honolulu” by E. A. Hanninen, 2017

a city offers amber beads to the gods.

Linda McCauley Freeman has an MFA in poetry from Bennington College. She has had the honor of being published in many literary journals and anthologies, and was the poet-in-residence of the Putnam Arts Council for five years. She also won short story awards in contests judged by Simon and Schuster's Michael Korda.

37

J. T. Whitehead in the manner of

Water 1.

2.

One day, a usurper came to a stream. The King was dead. The Queen lived on, like a prize, inanimate. The usurper wanted to wash his hands of the whole affair, but he couldn't, without violating the reflection of himself, which fascinated him and held him still, even though he could not love it. Bees, humming their songs in gods' tongues, a mass of matriarchy, were circling like halos hung over his head. He was stung.

3.

Black curtains covered the windows of the village as he entered, his head swollen, his eyes closed.

38

Arthur Rimbaud

Long ago, if a husband watched over the birth of a child, he had to keep his own hands under the breaking water, so that from that day on he might know what water truly was.

in the manner of

Out East

Cid Corman

the fire does not go out.

“Firewater Ripple� by E. A. Hanninen, 2017

the fire goes home.

J. T. Whitehead has had over 160 poems accepted for print by over 75 publications. Credits include Gargoyle, Lilliput Review, and Left Curve. He is the editor-in-chief of So It Goes: The Literary Journal of the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library. His first full-length collection of poetry, The Table of the Elements, published by The Broadkill River Press, was nominated for the National Book Award. He is also the winner of the Margaret Randall Poetry Prize (2015).

39

~for G. Stein

40

Gerald Stein

If you live long enough you outlive all the witnesses to your birth.

Barring contradicting old documents, you could claim you're a lost heir to the English throne or that you were born in a Bethlehem stable and so the second coming has already come; that is, if the only witnesses in that stable were heehawing jackasses, and as for the claim to the throne, only if Englishmen were even bigger asses, which they probably are.

Ah, but you've become the go-to eyewitness to the birth of this current next generation that by now has reached middle age or even older.

But no one today would be interested in the story of your birth, especially since no one is left to share your earliest memories, or has ever cradled infant-you in their arms.

It dawns on you that you are the last living eyewitness to your birth.

Not really, though.

You were too much a nearsighted, self-absorbed crybaby to notice.

What if your mother lied and your father was just some unnamed oat-sowing shack-up?

It was all a grand joke, your birth certificate was forged and your Social Security number stolen from some stillborn newborn.

How do you know for sure what the real truth is?

In short, who are you? Do you really know? Can you prove it?

But what the hell, now you can relive your birth as fantasy, there being no naysaying witnesses left.

You were born King of England or the Prince of Peace and you're collecting Uncle Sam's pension to boot.

dedicated to

Richard Fein The Joys of Outliving Everybody

“Francis II, Holy Roman Emperor� by Friedrich von Amerling, 1831

Richard Fein was a finalist in The New York Center for Book Arts 2004 Poetry Chapbook Competition. The Required Accompanying Cover Letter, his chapbook, was published by Parallel Press (2011), University of Wisconsin, Madison. He has been published in many web and print journals such as Cordite Poetry Review, The Cortland Review, Reed, The Southern Review, Roanoke Review, Green Silk Journal, Birmingham Poetry Review, Mississippi Review, Paris/Atlantic, Canadian Dimension, The Black Swan Review, Exquisite Corpse, Foliate Oak, Ken*Again, Oregon East, Southern Humanities Review, Skyline, Touchstone, The Windsor Review, and many others. Richard is a longtime contributor to The Centrifugal Eye. 41

Robert Frost

The word for package done up right is seaworthy, not watertight.

To prove his point, these fighting words: Americans are not too bright.

He’d sought me out and we’d conferred.

I tried to tell him he had erred.

Your box, though dry, is only shut, not ocean-going. That’s absurd.

How would you know? he huffed, tut-tut.

(I saw his box breast waves, putt-putt.)

You don’t speak English, envious of proper usage, nothing but.

He stood his ground, oblivious, looked down his nose, imperious, at watertight, impervious to watertight. Impervious.

inspired by

Karen Greenbaum-Maya Disputing on a Snowy Evening

Karen Greenbaum-Maya is a retired clinical psychologist and German Lit major. Photos and poems appear in many journals and anthologies. She co-hosts the poetry series Fourth Sundays: Poetry at the Claremont Library (California).

Kattywompus Press publishes her two chapbooks, Burrowing Song and Eggs Satori. Next time, it’s a hard rain a-gonna fall. Karen is a longtime contributor to The Centrifugal Eye.

42

I immerse this midsummer monarchy's foretop: Where you perceive that noon hour's desert, Think night thick with virgin sprigs in Stygian bosque and coppice.

I imagine this midnight moment's forest: Somewhat embryonic is all-embracing; nothing identical is dead— dog, cow, owl, crow quickening, moving, breathing.

Something else is alive bestriding the clodhopper's longbow.

Behind the sundial's gregarity condor (or woodcock or glowworm?) lurks, and lazily luxuriates beside the clock's loneliness and this bleak pagoda where my finitudes mug that teeming ream when your toes are still (that awkward avatar's all awash in eddies and swirls of disappearing ink) and this blank page where my fingers move.

Author’s Note: Attempt at an Oulipian glosa; each strophe consists of a set of oulipian variations on a line of the source text (known as the cabeza). Here the order is: 1) S+7, 2) antonymic translation, 3) univocal, 4) no nouns or no verbs, 5) original line.

43

Ted Hughes

I imagine this midnight moment's forest: Something else is alive Beside the clock's loneliness And this blank page where my fingers move. ~from “The Thought-Fox” (T. Hughes)

inspired by

Esther Greenleaf Mürer The thread-fractal

If only a phantom would stop reappearing!

Business, if you wanted to know, was punk at the opera.

Read the reviews to see whether the show is a flop or a hit. Though the latter, of course, would be cheering, the former is more like the outcome I'm fearing.

My stomach is all aflutter with lepidoptera.

If only a phantom would stop reappearing!

Business, as you probably know, was punk at the opera.

“Midnight Opera� by E. A. Hanninen, 2017

In places I thought the performance was searing.

Marguerite's "Jewel Song" was a show-stopper, a tour de force. I'd better make a note to drop her a line. That will help her to keep persevering.

If only that phantom would stop reappearing!

44

John Ashbery

I.

inspired by

Ashbery is of two minds about the opera

II. If only a phantom would stop reappearing!

Business, if you wanted to know, was punk at the opera.

So awful, in fact, that I got drunk at the opera.

The big fat soprano was so domineering I felt I was lucky to be hard of hearing.

I beg you, don't ask me what I thunk of the opera.

If only a phantom would stop reappearing!

Business, as I said before, was punk at the opera.

It's nearing the end of its run, which is cheering.

You probably think that I shouldn't debunk the opera, but I'm the sort who has always shrunk from the opera.

So I left, and at once my head started clearing.

(If only that phantom would stop reappearing!)

Author’s Note: Repeating lines from John Ashbery's "Faust." I, straight rondel. II, b lines have ghazal-type monorhyme and refrain.

Esther Greenleaf MĂźrer has been writing poetry since the age of six, but got serious about learning the craft when she turned 70. She has been featured poet in The Centrifugal Eye and Kin; she published her first collection, Unglobed Fruit, in 2011. Now in her 80s, she still lives in Philadelphia. Esther is a longtime contributor to The Centrifugal Eye.

45

Jessica Goody

The wallpaper blooms humid tropical foliage, blood-red blossoms unfurling behind the heads of odalisques reclining on striped pillows, the divan curving beneath them like the body of a lover.

A backdrop of vibrant fabrics curtain the room like a seraglio.

Oushaks and kilims burn underfoot as the light shines through the lacework windows and shuttered doors, where beaded lamps drip crystals atop runner-draped tables.

Orchids and potted plants crowd every surface, swarming the carved mantel and bowlegged iron tables. Lovingly arranged into precisely disheveled still-lives, the palm fronds spread their graceful green arms to the sun, tendrils inching upward like ivy.

Joyful nudes dance along the walls. Cobalt blue outlines like police silhouettes stretch and tumble, leap and caper.

Tinted ultramarine, the color of distant horizons, they resemble woad-stained Celts, rangy of limb and sinew.

Matisse lies abed in his atelier, industrious as Proust, surrounded by a sea of colored paper, scattered leaves and whimsical shapes that might be flowers or flames, strewn petals drifting to the floor like shards of glass.

Henri Matisse’s “Jazz” is a limited-edition artist’s book, which features prints of his colorful, cut-paper collages, known as “cut-outs.” The book was first issued on September 30, 1947, by art publisher Tériade.

46

Henri Matisse

Patterns catch the eye, crawling along wallpaper and upholstery in a mélange of colors and textures, rendering the room as exotic as a harem, draped with vivid slipcovers of Moroccan arabesques and damasks.

dedicated to

Jazz

Peasant Wedding, (Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 1569) ~for W. H. Auden

gorging on trestles laden with fowl from peacock to partridge, piecrust and crisp loaves like the sunburnt breasts of fishwives and wenches.

The mythological cupbearer pours waterfalls of beer into waiting steins, raised in a hearty toast, and refilled.

Freckled fishwives with storybook faces whisper about the wedding night, lappets flapping, stays taut with bloating.

The bride is pale beneath a paper crown, her nuptial wreath as fragile as her status.

Tomorrow she will become a beast of burden, a brood mare, a pack mule, a teat-swollen sow.

In the barn of piled straw and weathered wood the dun-colored monk begins the wedding vows.

Jessica Goody was born and raised on Long Island. She currently lives in South Carolina, where she writes for SunSations Magazine. Her work has appeared in numerous publications and anthologies, including Reader’s Digest, The Seventh Wave, Event Horizon, Chicken Soup for the Soul: My Very Good, Very Bad Cat, and The Maine Review. She was awarded second place in the 2015 Reader’s Digest Poetry Contest. Her poetry collection, Defense Mechanisms, is available from Phosphene Publishing Company.

47

Wystan Hugh Auden

Robust, ruddy-cheeked peasants swarthy with ale clap the rhythm of a ring-dance to the birdsong of the drunken piper. A wedding feast,

dedicated to

Bruegel’s Bride

~after “Paean to Place� (Niedecker)*

As iron sharpens iron

*in the manner of

Lynn Otto Canyon Welding

Lorine Niedecker

Iron copper steel welding wire wheel Our home in the clash of metal My sisters and I bade by heat and weight and made of metal Our father turned field to concrete floor which we swept of scrap and grit Saved the silver drill-bit curls our treasure twisted in our dark hair

48

We learned to measure Cut the steel for fixtures Keep away from the glare He wore a mask and warned us not to look Fashioned smoke and unforgiving light white sometimes blue burning blurs novas, stars from his very hands

I do not miss hearing grinders growl and whine scouring slag off I miss his whistling sweet sky-high flutter-tonguedvibrato mocksong-bird-singing every evening when we swept To keep our hands warm— plenty of old gloves 49

odd old gloves

Our bread was store fixtures — boring stuff His love lay in the difficult design of one-offs His mind mapped on paper measured machined in steel

We could not — like fixtures — be assembled We forged differences I was the necessary bucket of water cooling the overheat my older sister acetylene gas in a let’s-burn-through-it the hotter the better universe 50

One younger sister a shear The other a C-clamp — her hold on us

In grease grime and grit we grew loud and lung-full 8-tracks to sing along Sweet Jesus above us hand-and-glove love songs

Our father leaning into his work Are the things we make even half as fine?

Let go the damp thought In us an impulse blooms to build

51

You with your blood running with iron stand on this floor and sing You will make your own life “Multistar� by E. A. Hanninen, 2017

Lynn Otto's recent and forthcoming publications include poems in Compose: A Journal of Simply Good Writing, Driftwood Press, Eyedrum Periodically, Hartskill Review, Raleigh Review, and Sequestrum. She holds an MFA from Portland State University and was a 2015-16 resident associate at the National Humanities Center in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina. She is currently freelancing as a copy editor and calls Oregon home. Lynn is a regular contributor to The Centrifugal Eye.

52

inspired by

R. L. Black The Dream ~after R. Edson

~after C. Simic

R.L. Black is editor-in-chief of Unbroken Journal and Unlost Journal, and her own writing has been published across the web and in print. Find her where she blogs and reblogs about writing and LOST: rlblackauthor.tumblr.com

53

Charles Simic

I came to hear from my father, but I'm not surprised when the medium says, "There's a female energy coming through." Mother wasn't a tea drinker, and she was allergic to cats, so when the psychic says, "Your mother was a tea drinker, and oh, yes, I see, she had lots of cats," I hold my tongue, because it's fun to pretend my mother was a tea drinker with twenty cats. But when she smiles and adds, "And your mother adored you, dear," I nearly spit my own tea out. She's hearing from the other side, all right. I can see Mother there, giggling, spreadin' on the meadow mayo, as Daddy would say. “When you're done, Margaret,” he'd say, “may I have a word with our daughter?”

inspired by

Channeling Mother

Russell Edson;

An eagle dreams her feathers are coming out, gobs of them, striating the sky like cirrus clouds. A common dream, her companion tells her, right up there with dreams of falling. It means you’re afraid of growing old, he explains. Which is absurd, she thinks. Everyone knows eagles don’t age. Unless, of course, they fall.

I don’t tell him about the smell of detergent and the hum of the dryers, or that I was reading a borrowed textbook for a class I wasn’t taking.

I don’t tell him how my feet ached from waiting tables as I leaned against the glass and read that poem a second time, and then a third.

I don’t tell him how I copied it line by line into my notebook with its purple plastic cover, two pages after my mother’s recipe for blackberry cobbler.

I just tell him I remember the first time I read “For a Coming Extinction”, that it made me want to be a poet, to write poems like that.

I walk away remembering how, as I lay in the subleased bedroom by the railroad tracks while trains shook past, 54

William Stanley Merwin

When I shake the poet laureate’s hand, I don’t tell him the first time I read his work was on a summer night in the last year of the century, as I sat in the window of a laundromat while warm rain beaded on the pane.

dedicated to

Claire Hermann Reading W. S. Merwin in the Laundromat

I repeated those last lines: Tell him That it is we who are important, savoring their bitterness, the way they erased themselves again and again as I whispered them into the dark.

“Streaking Train” by E. A. Hanninen, 2017

Claire Hermann lives in central North Carolina, where she raises funds and tells stories for progressive nonprofits. Her work appears in such publications as Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, Lines + Stars, Bracken Magazine, Southern Women’s Review, and Prime Number Magazine. She has a weakness for cats, farmers’ markets, foggy mornings, and justice.

Website: http://www.ironclaywriters.com/

55

The remnants of lingo’s foreplay echo: every mote, every note and cliché.

There’s barely a breath of being singular or apart that hasn’t been gasped by another; no syllable alive that hasn’t been licked or kissed by other mouths or whispered into poetic cupboards hung with other lovers’ sighs.

But each spark of thought or phrase or iambic beast not yet birthed squirms to be heard, to burn its mark, nervously dreading those archeologists of the written art— paleontologists of plurality— who will excavate fossils of linguistic progeny, long-dead, and declare them fake.

The physics of how we shout dictates that echoes will spread 56

Rae Armantrout

Echo persuades us everything we say / has been said at least once before ~from “Two, Three” (Armantrout)

dedicated to

kerry rawlinson Echo

and repeat.

We pray we can create something elite and reckless from the echoes’ mutations: some solid, composite flesh of our own making; believing the audacious creature will venture far, reverberating effortlessly, without humiliation, forever able to flout the echoes of collective censure.

An autodidact and bloody-minded optimist, kerry rawlinson gravitated decades ago from sunny Zambian skies to solid Canadian soil. Fast-forward: she now follows poetry and art’s muses around the Okanagan, barefoot, wherever they lead. She’s won and been a finalist in poetry and art contests (e.g. Geist; Mississippi Valley; Postcard Poems and Prose Magazine; Fusion Art;) and features in lit-mags (often with artwork), eg. Canadian Literature; Main Street Rag; Minola Review; Right Hand Pointing; 3Elements LiteraryReview; Section8 Magazine; Wax Poetry and Art Magazine; and in anthologies, e.g. Forgotten Women, by Grayson Books. Photo-artwork appears in Qwerty Journal; Ad Hoc Fiction; The Adirondack Review; The Centrifugal Eye; Five on the Fifth. Blog: kerryrawlinson.tumblr.com 57

~after A. S. Ali

Where is that child, a gift of fog? His fingers on my rearview mirror, withdrawn too soon.

I sat beside you, never dared to say a word.

Your ghazals shorted out my lexicon too soon.

My brother let his friend joyride with me, my hair ablaze with air. We grazed the autobahn too soon.

These memories, exotic turtles washed out to sea, incessantly returning home to spawn too soon.

The herald ganders call, like streamers trailing above the wedding carillon too soon.

Again, a long wind flutes the mountainside.

Again, the sun's rays strike Memnon too soon.

Your mountains bonded with your mind, their snow a touch obliterating borders, monuments— one Ramadan too soon.

And you, Shahid, what wager stumbled late to bring this loss, your season gone too soon?

58

Agha Shahid Ali

When I retraced your words one dawn too soon, the sun looked back at its own pantheon too soon.

in the manner of

Siham Karami East-West Highway

A Shakespearean sonnet in his style, with modern application

Siham Karami lives in Florida. Her poems have appeared in such places as Measure, The Comstock Review, Think Journal, Unsplendid, Mezzo Cammin, Alabama Literary Review, Naugatuck River Review, Peacock Journal, Antiphon, Angle: Journal of Poetry in English, The HyperTexts, The Rotary Dial, Autumn Sky Poetry, Sukoon, Right Hand Pointing, and The Ghazal Page, among other venues and anthologies. She is also a semi-finalist in the Naugatuck River narrative poetry contest and winner of a Laureates' prize in the Maria W. Faust sonnet competition. This is Siham’s second appearance in The Centrifugal Eye. Blog: sihamkarami.wordpress.com

59

William Shakespeare

When death inscribed its tattoo on my cells, I evolved through tadpole, bird, and beast, to human rocked between the pulsing walls that gripped in waves until I was released to giant hands, a flood of air and light.

A sudden breath — and all I am cried No! Soothed by sleep and waking sense delight, I found my way through surge and undertow, learning what to lose and what to keep, surviving emptiness and overflow as my roots twisted further in the deep, the sky a height of beauty called tomorrow where my mind took flight, beyond the brink— until my furious flame revealed the ink.

in the manner of

Double Helix

Cento Source: Eamon Grennan, “The Quick of It”

60

Eamon Grennan

So this is what it comes down to? Earth and sand, A walk across patches of trespassed grass?

I saw the melancholy of wet sheep penned in a field of rushes, thistles, scrubby grass.

So you'll bow down to grass. You'll take the tame scents in From time to time, walking through the fall morning — sky a pale Ache. Frigid air’s taken in at the mouth, to mix with the warm world Here now, still warm and looking.

A migrant bark of geese. Where is the life I've left? Its sleeping statues?

I couldn't but think that in the heart of things, at the very center of what's possible It can't be crossed and you have to turn back the way you came, turning To how things were once, but go on ending and ending here On the perfect pause of thresholds, Such signs of flourishing decay. With steel brush, shears Stripped down to sheer unmitigated syntax, this sense of what begins Against the backdrop of weather turning its back on us, In this city where every step is a sort of walk on water, a litany From thunder, lightning; a downpour suddenly deep-drowning the air Hasn't heard a word of it, although it stops me cold.

The silence after though, that has to be the same.

Isn't it time to step from shelter, breathe free air, and say it?

An alleyway is a short walk, so I imagine those big wings raised, So I keep saving the bees taken unawares by glass.

inspired by

Melissa Carl Backdrop 1

Cento Source: Eamon Grennan, “The Quick of It�

61

Eamon Grennan

Because in dreams sometimes I've been in so strange a place, I wake In this city where every step is a sort of walk on water, a litany To how things were once, but go on ending and ending here.

Against the backdrop of weather turning its back on us, The bees are out among the furled or flapping scarlets of fuchsia bells, seeking On the perfect pause of thresholds.

But what are four oranges, Here, now, still warm and looking?

I couldn't but think that in the heart of things, at the very center of what's possible, What happens when a body is thrown open like a tree the sun rummages, Stripped down to sheer unmitigated syntax, this sense of what begins?

A walk across patches of trespassed grass Hasn't heard a word of it, although it stops me cold.

It can't be crossed and you have to turn back the way you came, turning From thunder, lightning, a downpour suddenly deep-drowning the air.

Such signs of flourishing decay. With steel brush, shears, Isn't it time to step from shelter, breathe free air, and say it?

So I keep saving the bees taken unawares by glass.

So you'll bow down to grass. You'll take the tame scents in.

The silence after though, that has to be the same.

So this is what it comes down to? Earth and sand, Both sides suddenly like that, how can your steady step not falter?

Now the buried stones have risen and would almost talk, Become shadows and blunted silhouettes of themselves, birds In huddles incline pale faces to the light.

inspired by

Backdrop 2

“Hanging Doll” by D. J. Bryant, 2016

You can visit the real Island of Dolls online: http://www.isladelasmunecas.com/

Melissa Carl has published her work with a variety of publications, including Amoskeag, …and love… (anthology, Jacar Press), The Broken Plate, Blood Lotus, Cellpoems, CircleShow, The Copperfield Review, Curio Poetry, Freshwater, Halfway Down the Stairs, In Posse Review, Off the Coast, Toad, and The Waiting Room Reader: Words to Keep You Company, Vol. II (anthology). In April 2013 she was one of 85 participants in The Found Poetry Review’s National Poetry Month Pulitzer Remix Project. She currently lives and teaches in York, PA, and Oak Island, NC. This is Melissa’s second appearance in The Centrifugal Eye.

62

Russell Edson

A man plays with dolls. And parts of dolls. Well, he finds them floating in the canal and hangs them on trees. When they pulled the little girl from the canal her eyes were emptied of trees. He thinks the dolls please the girl.

The hollow spaces of the dolls please the spiders, the insects. The mold.

The man stops counting dolls after a hundred. The man stops trying to stop his sadness long before that. The dolls are hairless, ill-formed, strange— a lot like the man. On a doll that still has a head, the man pins a string of plastic pearls. He counts them, instead of money, instead of birds.

Dolls hang from wash lines. Fences. Branches. How does your garden grow?

People drift by on boats, swear that the dolls move their limbs and eyes.

The man just drifts . . .

in the manner of

The Island of Dolls

~after “Burning of Three Fires” (Beaumont)*

ii Early morning steeps the kitchen in yellow light. A faint scent of jasmine wafts from your china cup and saucer.

They still sit on the sideboard, but a glued crack cannot hold forever. iii I cancelled your order for Jasmine Pearl.

No, I don’t want you back.

Just the thought of it brings on a migraine.

Your china cup and saucer? They’re long gone.

Gave them to Goodwill months ago.

63

Jeanne Marie Beaumont

i Your china cup and saucer sit on the sideboard, flower the air with memories of Jasmine Pearl.

The tea, tightly bound, dropped into boiled water, unfurled into a delicate lotus.

Watching it steep became our morning ritual.

*in the manner of

Mary Jo Balistreri Morning Tea

dedicated to

Rain

64

Patricia Fargnoli

If you have ever seen rain under a porch light its ping and bounce on the deck like a child on a trampoline or rain falling into a pond stippling soft shadows onto its surface sliding undetected under its skin then you have glimpsed permanence in the guise of change and if you have ever walked in the rain just for the sheer pleasure of walking listened to rain’s tap-tap on your blue windbreaker noticed the crystals hanging from buckthorn rainbows in the oily blacktop and how in silence the dripping is the heartbeat of trees and when you’re doused and silvered by rain how easy to lose yourself in it becoming river aquifer replenished and filled to the brim yet small like a tadpole in life’s first water You might laugh at rain’s sheer abundance running down your hair

“Cellophane Rain” by E. A. Hanninen, (First appeared in from east-to-west, bicoastal verse, 2009)

onto your face watching it shapeshift with sun’s brief scattershot mist fog dark clouds mounting and you might discover that joy even as thunder rumbles overhead has no beginning no end

Mary Jo Balistreri has two poetry collections, Joy in the Morning and Gathering The Harvest, published by Bellowing Ark Press, and a chapbook, Best Brothers, published by Tiger's Eye Press. Her work has appeared in Parabola, Kind of a Hurricane Press, Plainsongs, Tiger's Eye: A Journal of Poetry; Avocet, A Journal of Nature Poems; Crab Creek Review, Quill & Parchment, The Heron's Nest, Acorn, and A Hundred Gourds. She is also one of the founders of Grace River Poets, an outreach for women's shelters, churches, and schools. Mary Jo is a regular contributor to The Centrifugal Eye. Website: maryjobalistreripoet.com

65

inspired by

Nancy L. Cook Las LĂĄgrimas

Linda Pastan

It is raining on the house of Diego Ortiz; rain strafes the white flowers of the yucca plants in the hills above.

Streams of anguish darken the arroyos’ banks, wash the mud with mud; draperies of tears shroud the plain red dirt that has rusted with thirst for so long.

The rain, thinks Diego, falls too quick.

A drowning man, he would seize the black tresses, loosened from the sky on her calculated whim, that whip the air like tails of mustangs on the run, that fill a dry and empty ditch with fury. He would crush the white flowers with his callused hands.

There is a storm above his house, and all because in the name of her gods the crazy Isleta who is also his woman prayed for rain, prayed for obliterating rain.

66

A stage must be suspended in the dark recesses of lost imagination, where players’ voices stimulate a spark, and their forms serve mind’s illumination.

A stage must be invisible to those who, daily life escaping, beg complete absorption in the crises players pose, as there, before their eyes, chance to meet heart and truth. The empty stage is mere prop, artifact in the playwright’s low command — yet large enough to hold all of Europe, intimate as the holy palmer’s hand.

This altar the bard’s magic shall affirm til time itself doth cease its breathing. Oh, Will . . .

Nancy L. Cook is a writer and teaching artist living in St. Paul, Minnesota, and her work has most recently appeared in pacific REVIEW, Halcyon Magazine, St. Petersburg Review, Pilgrimage, and Bengal Lights. She also runs the “Witness Project,” a series of community workshops enabling the development of stories of, by, and for populations underserved by the justice system.

67

William Shakespeare

~in honor of W. Shakespeare

dedicated to

On Seeing Shakespeare Performed in Stratford-Upon-Avon

A. H. Muir ~after “To a Mouse” (Burns)*

A. H. Muir, semi-retired, lives outside Gullane, near Edinburgh, Scotland, although his family hails originally from the West of Scotland, near Kilmarnock. Currently, he’s involved with property renovation in the main.

An interest in things historic led to his involvement with re-enactment, primarily of the 15th century, when the medieval armor and clothing were most splendid: a great opportunity to show off. He’s written for and run various local medieval events in Scotland, as well; more recently, he’s also participated in World War II events.

Poetry has been a pursuit throughout life — one to which he’s returned at intervals as the muse has taken him. He follows a classical style, with rhyme and rhythm central to his writing, considering the Victorian poets as wonderful models. Their fascination with things Gothic mirrors his own. He admires poets such as Alfred, Lord Tennyson, with his mysterious and haunting "The Lady of Shallot." Of course, no Scot could call himself such without honoring his greatest poet, Rabbie Burns: a simple farmer initially, but one whose poetic abilities took him into the highest echelons of 18th-century Scottish society . . . and into the arms of many a comely lass.

A. H. admits to seeking something of the quirky in his poetry, so parodying such great writers appeals. Hence, his poem here to the humble fly, even more humble than Burn's mouse. Any similarity is entirely deliberate! He assures us.

68

Robert Burns

Wee, flittin’, skittin’, winged beastie, Oh, what a panic’s in thy breastie.

Thy wings aye beat wi’ power and strummin’, But it does nae good, cos you’re caught in the gummin’, And it’s saved me a lot of bother tae tell you the truth, Just hangin’ a fly paper doon frae the roof.

*in the manner of

Tae a Fly

“Cuban Wall Mural, with Typewriter” by Karla Linn Merrifield, 2016

Next Up:

An Essay by Eve Anthony Hanninen A Review by Gram Joel Davies Our Review Column by Karla Linn Merrifield, with Interviews

69

Borrowed Poems, Inspired Journeys

By Eve Anthony Hanninen

I don’t love you as if you were the salt-rose, topaz or arrow of carnations that propagate fire: I love you as certain dark things are loved, secretly, between the shadow and the soul. ~Pablo Neruda, “XVII,” from One Hundred Love Sonnets

When asked what I do, besides mentioning I’m a literary editor, and an illustrator, I usually confess I write science fiction and that I’m a poet. The response by non-poets is usually, You mean, like, love poems? It’s a hard question for me to answer. Invariably, I say, Um, no, not exactly. At least not in the way the asker typically expects: hearts, flowers, la la la.

I do write, uh, love poems, but they aren’t odes or dedications, and seldom if ever do they contain the word “love” (unlike the bold Neruda up there in the quote, who is allowed to get away with it).

And they’re not even protestations against love, although you could consider them such, if you figure out that many of my poems are statements of subtle irony. Almost all of them involve exposing the reactions of people and their relationships to their environments, to their physical and emotional landscapes.

No, you see, my love poems are the fabric of those “certain dark things” brooding “between the shadow and the soul.”

Nobel prizewinner Pablo Neruda is a master poet of both the love poem genre and the ode, and I admit his clear-eyed-yet-dark vision (ironic, as there are several instances he referred to himself, in narration, as blind) encouraged me to re-attend with admiration, over

70

the years, his “journey with water and with stars, / with smothered air and abrupt storms of flour.”

Like most writers, I have my favorite poets, of course.

Obviously, Neruda is one of them. And the influences of these favorite poets have had some effect on me, I realize. I ask myself, now, digging sharply for the truth, if any one of them has shaped the voice of my writing. I can’t say that just one has. Not even Neruda.

But within the force of a lifetime conglomeration of voices heard and techniques studied, I’m sure I am the writerly sum of all I’ve read — of the master poets, especially Pablo Neruda, Rainier Maria Rilke, William Wordsworth, Rita Dove, Ntozake Shange, Floyd Skloot, Robert Sund, Sharon Olds, et al. . . . and of all the contemporary poets I have read and edited over the years for The Centrifugal Eye. You poets reading this — who make up a large percentage of our readership — have serenaded my working life for over a decade.

You gave me thousands of hours of collaborative joy in the crafting and recrafting of words, lines, and stanzas. You helped my invaluable group of volunteer staff members, and me, pull together issue after literary issue of combined intelligent thought and artistic vision. We all made The Centrifugal Eye together. And we made it spectacular with the ringing of your voices.

In this issue of TCE, you fellow poets are ringing out yet again, a chorus of lyrical voices paying homage to our peers, predecessors of centuries past, or contemporaries of the pen (and keyboard). Some of you have remarked to me what a rewarding lesson it’s been for you to think inside another poet’s head with the intention of writing in his or her manner. It is rewarding!

It’s reminded me that not only have I had the pleasure of watching how this works from the editor’s side of the desk, but also I’ve attempted it a few times from the poet’s.

Indulging the penchant for “certain dark things” again, I was lucky to have a poem published in The HyperTexts (2006) that I wrote in the manner of Aeschylus:

71

Borrowing Agamemnon: An Assassin’s Oration ~after Aeschylus Cursed Cockroaches, scuttling at my feet, let me ease the pain, straighten my elbow; one whole day perched on the sill, high above the Avenue, nesting like a peregrine.

I know the birds by sight, fellow observationists of speck and spot below; the white one, mother against the wind, her winged shelter evocative of snowdrift against the pane— I dread to disturb her.

I know them, when they rest and when they fly, but now I watch for the target, and a signal from the right hailing the time has come, The Man shall be taken down. So I am commanded, scapegoat for mean hopes.

They mean to say That Man made bedfellows of rabble.

I keep to my arms, soaked in sweat, finger stiff even as it tenses and thoughts drift through the room, waking dreams as bold as you ’roaches— my comrades, my accessories to murder.

I must not miss. No.

Now, that was fun to write! (Hopefully, fun to read, too, in a noir sort of way.) I’d also written a long poem called, “In the Span of a Dahlia” (Wicked Alice, 2007), dedicated to Eleanor Lerman, inspired by her poem, “Starfish.” Come to think of it, there are at least a few more poems I wrote as tributes, or fashioned after and dedicated to an admired poet. Alice N. Persons, Octavia Butler (twice), and Neruda (of course), come to mind.

72

I don’t suppose I’ll stop “‘Borrowing Agamemnon’” and other poems while I’m still fit to write. It’s a stimulating impetus, one that a poet can certainly use now and then to become inspired. I hope that those of you TCE poets who contributed to this issue will continue to look for inspiration now and then in your own favorite poets; your efforts have been so worth reading.

There are plenty of you TCE poets I’m inspired by, too, and I look forward to reading much more of your poetry over the coming years — for your own “smothered air” and “storms of flour” to borrow.

And yes, although The Centrifugal Eye literary journal is being put down for a long nap (just heard? Listen on), its editors will continue to live literary lives of one sort or another. We made many poet friends among you, too, and we hope the bonds will remain until TCE resurrects, but especially if it never does. It’s hard to predict what may happen in even just a couple of years. Let’s all look forward and see what transpires in 2019.

You know, one thing I’ll really miss is doing the Featured Poet interviews; I got to know quite a few of you through those intense projects, writing back and forth until we were happy with the flow, and in the end our readers learned so much about how you ticked, why you wrote, and what mattered to you.

I regret that there just wasn’t time to do an in-depth, featured poet interview for this last issue. But our review-column editor, Karla Linn Merrifield, saved our Centrifugal butts by offering a review that incorporated mini-interviews with a good number of the poets whose books she’d reviewed in previous issues. Great way to make homage, Karla!

And that leaves one last thing for me to say as editor-in-chief of The Centrifugal Eye: TCE wouldn’t have lasted for 11 years without her many dedicated volunteers. I’ve been blessed with a terrific succession of staff, and I am grateful to have worked with every one of our editors,

73

artists, and submission readers, no matter how short or long their terms.

I must give a special thanks, though, to the two editors who have stayed with me the longest — Karla Linn Merrifield, and Maureen Kingston. Accomplished poets in their own rights, they have brought an expansive sophistication to our journal through their poetic knowledge, psychological sensitivity, and attention to the finer points of craft. I intend to associate with these perceptive, eloquent, and loving women for the rest of our days.

It’s been a fantastic, centrifugal carnival-ride, hasn’t it, gals?

But excuse me now while I go write some love poems in secret.

Eve Anthony Hanninen, longtime editor-in-chief and publisher of The Centrifugal Eye poetry journal, is also an American poet and illustrator dreaming of spring gardening in verdant Vancouver, BC. Her poems have appeared in About Place Journal, Karla Linn Merrifield & Friends (mgversion2>datura), Switched-on Gutenberg, and many other print and online literary journals.

During her hiatus from publishing TCE, she intends to appear in as many more journals as possible. Her work may also be found in The Centrifugal Eye’s 5thAnniversary Anthology (staff selections), Lynn Strongin’s Crazed by the Sun, and Trim: A Mannequin Envy Anthology. Eve also produces 2 other publishing imprints: Centrifugal Works, and Sylvanshine Editions; accepts projects for Hanninen Freelance Editing; and has returned to writing SF & F.

74

“Roundup Centrifugal Carnival Ride” by E. A. Hanninen, 2017

75

Bunchberries, More Poems of Canada

by Karla Linn Merrifield FootHills Publishing (2015) 978-0921053-65-1, 86 pages, $18

Bunchberries : A Review, in Tribute to The Centrifugal Eye’s Column Reviewer, Karla Linn Merrifield

by One of The Centrifugal Eye’s Longtime, Casual Reviewers, Gram Joel Davies loonmoosewolf waterlilybunchberry blacksprucewhitepinemaple —“Algonquin Gestalt”

Travel poetry; it is a concept that crystalized for me as I read Karla Linn Merrifield’s Bunchberries. A pure form of poetry, exploring self and relationship in terms of place — as so much writing must, it’s true — only there is a subjective intensity to this book, charting the passage into Canada: Quebec and Ontario.

A journey, a relationship with a specific landscape, forming a natural sequence in which a personal quest is revealed. Perhaps we best notice ourselves when we step outside.

Karla Linn Merrifield’s collection is both celebration and elegy — because she is exploring, but also reclaiming life. The environment she logs with naturalist’s eyes is a thriving entity, and also the stage for a play about another explorer, one who visited once before. The cultures inhabiting the landscape are moss on old stones, and their technology once sparkled in another era. Their mystery was effused by stories her brother brought into Merrifield’s childhood home, when she was still young.

76

Bunchberries takes us on three legs, a trip which sets sail in high spirits. Part one, “Maritime Blue,” is as well a place to begin, because this is a journey and should be looked at in sequence. We find a map of the book’s terrain in these early moments. Merrifield approaches her subject in several ways, through a prosaic (but imaginative) narrative; by personifying what she encounters; and through a kind of song.

Now imagine — we are on a nautical tack, “beyond the bosom of the harbor.” From St. John, the Bay of Fundy opens like a new page. Three poems, “Quick Work,” “Running Away Together,” and “Essential Maritimes,” brief us on what’s to come. Karla Linn Merrifield’s storytelling style is a simple, precise account: the two ferries of Harding’s point, how long the journey takes, the deck mate’s smile. This is the backbone of the collection, a solid account from which more lyrical flights are launched. Established, the point of view shifts and becomes that of the boats themselves, who “long to give their captains the slip.” Vessels as characters in their own right.

But in order to describe the true magic of the realms she travels into, Merrifield turns to a third means, incantatory weaving of “fog and roses,” a refrain that calls the landscape into being as if from the dawn of time.

Fog and roses are reborn each year on the breath of whales ...............................

Fog cannot survive without the intoxicating aroma of roses —“Essential Maritimes”

There is something essential in it, what feels like endless cycling of two elements which compose all of Briar Island and its surrounding waters, the wide region of Nova Scotia, like yin and yang. An impression of aeonic processes underlies Merrifield’s 77

writing (and The Bay of Fundy is apparently very rich in history and fossils). It is a matter of scale, reach, but the brief lives of those she meets, the cultures in which they decline, are no less important. This is a many layered world.

This awareness of deep time reminds me, a little and in this respect, of the writing of Anne Michaels, but more outward facing.

Part one draws near to a close with two poems that I could imagine as distinct from the rest. They are capable of working in isolation as well as forming part of the journey through Bunchberries; there are big themes inside them, of death and of life.

Like rubies, medusa sea jellies, still moist, and sea skate, its opal underbelly exposed —“Proper Adornment”

In Karla Linn Merrifield’s poems, beauty and desolation coexist, which is seen quintessentially there. A favorite piece of mine (being, as I am, an unashamed dendrophile) follows, “When I Wish upon a Tree,” where, with her signature ability to create powerful repetition, Merrifield prompts us to “Stand pat in a thick stand of trees” and “learn from the spruce trees’ / first stand.” A heavy pulse, the beating of sap, a love affair with natural history.

In contrast, I have a personal struggle with poems like “Special Load,” which grants character to objects. I am reminded too much of exercises at school that left me with a similar barrier toward “concrete” poetry. The voice of the boat Joe Casey in this particular piece is convincing—“I go by Joe, Joe-Boy, Old Joe”—and it is at least refreshing to hear a traditionally female entity, a vessel, given male persona.

Shipped north, Québec in White makes a sweet stop-off in what 78

is the shortest and arguably most exquisite stretch of the book.

Merrifield evokes the fog once more, “leitmotif for this journey into isolation.” It is here readers may begin to ask if there is not some powerful, unifying motive for her travels — is this it, the search to be alone? Whether running away from or toward, her fascination with the characters she meets seems to belie a need for outright separation.

There is healing to be had, nonetheless, though the hurt remains unclear.

From fog of dreams to spruce riffs against pink sky ....................................

I roll out of bed, no telephone rings & I sing again, I sing again.

—“Lost and Found in Les Madelienes”

I, as reader, sing along in my pidgin French, reciting aloud wherever I can, because it is in Québec that language takes on the landscape, its features are the real green sea, forests of weeping vines — and bunchberries. Karla Linn Merrifield senses the music in words, and “peppers” her day “with la langue romantique,” as she does her poems. This is where, she says, she falls back into this other way of speaking.

It is an immersion that can be seen to inform her writing process, evidence, perhaps, that turning her mind to words themselves has begun to influence her work in other ways. Poets know how it feels when events experienced in one day suddenly become perfect images for what we have itched to get into words.

How a philosophy arrived at by some unrelated means can become, for a time, our poetic modus operandi.

So Québec in White not only revels in the sonics of le français, but also there are poems which riff on particular phonetics; there are puns and pieces which spring from the undefinable nuance of the other 79

language’s version of a familiar word.

“I am preoccupied with B” writes Merrifield, at one stage.

B leads not to C but to another:

the Bog. The bog’s beckoning bunches-of-berries-to-be.

—B, B, B . . .

I credit her sensitivity as a poet, because this two-page poem does not exclusively run in one vein (which would probably tire).

Rather, like the refrains in others of her poems, it sets up a pulse, not regular but wavelike. “Breathing dwarf larch and orchids / . . .

I’m baffled I can step away, venture / beyond the subtle beauty . . .”

And, yes, I find it beautiful.

With regards to punning, “Three Cohen Koans” must have relevance to Québec beyond my field of knowledge, but the third in number, “Rêverie de la Cité,” feels important because this “dream of the city” helps frame another poem with a French title, simply “Rêverie” — a word whose connotations are doubled in that language, between the wondering mind and a literal dream. It is possible that the one poem laid the trail to the next in the creative unconscious, because they all must have been written during this particular phase of Merrifield’s trip. It’s a curious poem that is itself caught between fantasy and reality. Merrifield speaks of passing through a doorway, into a forest at night, and of visitation by light that comes to the mind as though from beyond. In my reading of the piece, a creative tap has opened with the permission to play with another lexicon. The night imagery leans more heavily on the dreaming mind; there is a little of A Midsummer Night’s Dream lurking in there somewhere.

Very different in tone from Bunchberries’ other works, with a strong sense of epiphany or personal passage: “I am lost and found,” (that 80

phrase a second time) we hear.

The section closes with a poem much more earthly in tone (Cohen is on Spotify®, this time), which wraps up the subconscious threads. Karla Linn Merrifield is bringing what was buried, pent up, into the light of day.

The puzzle of extricating last weepy cobwebs, how to whisk away inexplicable words— Out! Out, damned anger, out thou, grief . . .

—Daydream Song (Chanson de Rêverie)

Grief. On first reading of the book, this is cryptic, but after running through it both ways the integral logic is impressive. Like a novel, Bunchberries does not reveal all but plays out a plot. Merrifield is compelled by a hidden purpose — she carries us across the water to the point of her release. Québec in White closes with the inkling of what grief has led us here but we have to read on.

Onward, to Ontario the Green, and the lengthier stage of the Bunchberries itinerary. In many senses, more of the same, though the landscape shifts again. Karla Linn Merrifield dallies with an imagined Bashō, walks along Lake Erie’s north shore with him, and lets the world become a poem. Why is he here? It is difficult to say, except simply that this is how her adventure ran, but the landscape builds in the mind as they go. Beyond these lyrical wanderings, there is another set of poems that adopts characters and personifies. It is a bit at odds with the feeling of the book to read that “The language of this wild place / is spoken best by insects,” but to hear, when they do speak, the cant of the city streets, “Welcome to the ‘hood, sistah.’”

Perhaps the hive is a conurbation, but the logic of that falls when “The Sand Toad Monologue” quips, “But fo’ I hip-hop it outta dis place.”

More puns, but always, the lingo is perfectly rendered.

It is where Merrifield’s straight narrative takes over that the 81

emergence of her core theme happens, and the poetry is at its best.

Algonquin wasn’t any story he told me. ....................................

Yet it became a storied place for me: .................................... where kid sisters couldn’t go.

—“Once Upon a Place”

Bunchberries is not a pleasure cruise, it is a search for closure to a long suppressed hunger. “In his legendary land, / I smell the ghost of that boy-man.” Karla Linn Merrifield appears to find such closure in “The Healing at Chandos Lake in the Kawarthas.” The poem echoes “Rêverie” with its return to light. I count the word nine times across the nine stanzas in a poem that combines all of her strengths as a writer, the refrain that mythologizes the moment, and her way of ascribing intention to place, to the lake. “This is the better light / to view my brother, she says.” Most of all, it is Merrifield’s frankness that comes across: Burning with disgust at what my brother did to his life with his death— his self-pollution . . .

—“Healing at Chandos Lake . . .”

This entire journey, shared in Bunchberries, recreates Canada for its reader as potently as any diary. By the time we close the book, the country, its prehistory and people; bodies of water and evergreen expanses; the bogs and the fog and the frogs; the bunchberries, ferries 82

“Bunchberries, More Poems of Canada” Stock Photo, Image by Karla Linn Merrifield, 2015

and whales, stretch as far as the eye can see. Merrifield is scientist (“I’d take a stooge / over false gods any day”) and mystic, following her “Beach Tao.” It all appears to begin when, “while sorting it all out, I found / my brother’s passport application,” and it ends there, too, her own voyage continuing sans frère.

The color photos, which intersperse this handbound collection, complement the work. As a British individual who has never crossed the Atlantic, I am satisfied by how far it takes me. Reading and travel both broaden the mind . . . perhaps that’s true. I mouth the words and the trip moves me bodily.

Gram Joel Davies Lives in Devon, UK. His latest poetry can be read in The Interpreter’s House, The Fenland Reed and Dark Mountain. His collection, Bolt Down This Earth, is published by V. Press, spring 2017. Gram is a longtime contributor, both of poetry and review articles, to The Centrifugal Eye. You can find him online at his website: http://gramjoeldavies.uk 83

“Hands of a Poet” (William Heyen) by Karla Linn Merrifield, 2016 First published on her Vagabond Poet blog

Merrifield’s

Tao of Poetry Reading

By Karla Linn Merrifield

84

The Tao of Reading Poetry Will Return Sometime or Other after this Message.

The Tao of Reading Writing Poetry Goes On. The Light Is Never Off. Please, don’t make me cry. There’s been enough sadness in the ether of late. Besides, this isn’t goodbye. This is until-we-meet-again.

But, but . . . it sure feels like adios, amigos, when I look back on 9 of TCE’s initial 10 years.

Before I became the review columnist in 2007, I’d been featured poet, guest editor, and poetry (38) and photography contributor (16).

I got to work with Eve, getting to know her and the journal almost from its get-go. So, it’s hard not to sniffle, and wonder where the time went, and how in the world will I ever fill the vacuum left behind?

On hiatus. I keep repeating to myself those comforting words, on hiatus, on hiatus. It’s not over-over.

The point of the final (gasp, gasp) column is to remind us where we have been and maybe yield clues that will help us on the Tao forward as a community of poets, poetry, artists, art, and you, our readers. Eve and her staff, including me, brought beauty into everyone’s lives. The Centrifugal Eye deepened us all, challenged us all.

Most important (IMO): we brought more light into the world for us all. Poetry is light in the darkness. Each poem is a candle in the darkness. And the master poets we honor in this issue remind us of that whenever we turn to their poems for inspiration, affirmation, challenges, lessons in craft . . . and we pay the gift forward.

Over my 8 years as reviewer I had the honor to welcome 27 poets into these pages with their 24 books. Almost all of the books 85

were selected upon the recommendations of our readers. They can take credit for their roles in bringing together this august group of poets whose books came to be reviewed in The Tao of Reading Poetry column.

Recently, I invited those authors to join in our anniversary celebration. 10 of the poets responded with answers to 2 queries:

EITHER tell readers what you’re working on now that they can look forward to, OR tell them about your most recent book and why they’ll want to read it.

What ONE book by a “master” poet inspired you most? Why? [Making for a nifty contribution to the issue’s theme.]

There’s some really juicy stuff coming up, but before we get to that, a word about the 17 poets who didn’t respond for a number of reasons: 2 of them declined, a few of them I couldn’t locate, and, my friends, 2 of those poets have joined the venerable William Stafford, whose The Way It Is: New & Selected Poems glowed in the spotlight for Vol 4, Issue 3, Ephemera.

For my first Tao review, I cast starlight on Beau Cutts’s Night Is A Rare Place And Other Poems. You can find it in Vol 3, Issue 3, Ephemera. TCE published the “in memoriam” I wrote for Beau to share with this community in Autumn 2013, Vol 8 Issue 2, Jeweled.

Ephemera again. In this case, ephemeral lives.

Ephemeral was the life in poetry of Harry Calhoun, so I learned.

I had reached out to Harry by email about this roundup, but it bounced back. Not surprising; I hadn’t “talked” to Harry since 2013.

Email addys change, right? I then messaged him on Facebook. That’s where the surprise came in. His wife, Trina Allen, returned my post: 86

“Beloved husband and poet Harry Calhoun passed away in his home in Raleigh on October 31, 2015.” Oh my. I had no idea.

I’m consoled knowing we shared a few special poet-to-poet years, and am buoyed knowing we gave each other the gift of collaboration between two poets across cyberspace who rode each other’s wavelengths. For 5th Anniversary – 12 Months – Vol 5, Issue 4, I reviewed I knew Bukowski like you knew a rare leaf: Forty poems in three acts and The Black Dog and the Road.

I imagined I was sitting in Harry’s living room, directly addressing him throughout the unfolding review. I stopped to pet the black dog of his book. Turned down a drink. Critiqued his work face to face. Only time I’ve taken that posture for a review, but it was just right for Harry and his books. I had a hoot.

Thank you, Harry, for getting me to dig Bukowski, and for showing me how powerful a little technique can be, like your triple-spaced stanza break followed by a single-line stanza at poem’s end. You shone your light on the quotidian, shone light on a few important mysteries of life.

This line’s for you, and the molecules you have become.

Not represented here but certainly present in spirit are the following remarkable poets. I thank you again: Patrick Carrington, Hard Blessings, Quantum Mind - Vol 4, Issue 2 Laury A. Egan, Snow, Shadows, a Stranger, Unbidden Visitors - Vol 4, Issue 3 Michael Rhynes, Guerillas in the Mist, and Other Poems, Battling Stereotypes - Vol 4, Issue 4 Pat Roth Schwartz, co-ed., Doing Time to Cleanse My Mind, Battling Stereotypes - Vol 4, Issue 4 Jessie Carty, The Wait of Atom, April Has the Cruelest Voice - Vol. 6, Issue 1 87

C.L. Bledsoe, Tulsa, and Michael Cadnum, The Woman Who Discovered Math, Chapter & Verse/Tech+Urban - Vol 7, Issue 2 Chris Crittenden, Jugularity, Punchline First - Vol 8, Issue 1 Matthea Harvey, If the Tabloids Are True What Are You?, East of West/Elemental Verse - Vol 9 Issue 1 Julie Bruck, Monkey Ranch, Story Poems - Vol 9, Issue 2 Stephen Fry, The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking the Poet Within, Unformed - Vol 10, Issue 1

I now turn you over to Lorna, Jim, Scot, M. J., et al., for an abundance of light in their own words to enlighten you.

Lorna Crozier

The Blue Hour, Predilection for Prediction – Vol 3, Issue 4 (Web only, retired)

My latest book, The Wrong Cat, will let you know why there are no wrong cats. One of the sequences explores what place has to do with love and loss. The poems have titles like “Man from the Sargasso Sea,” “Man from the Cariboo,” “Man from Hades,” and they’re in the voice of a woman who is looking back on a lover who is no longer with her. In the book you’ll learn about the first dog in heaven, a mother’s last breath, the ways in which animals find humans wanting. The collection just won two national awards, for best book of Canadian poetry in 2015 and best book by a Canadian woman.

I’m on my way to give a lecture at the University of Beijing so I’ve been revisting Kenneth Rexroth’s One Hundred Poems from the Chinese. Now there’s a masterful book! If it were the only one on my 88

shelf, I would be enriched for all my days by the likes of Tu Fu and and Mei Yao-ch’en and Lu Yu. What a gift Rexroth gave the Englishspeaking world. In the hundreds and hundreds of years since these Chinese poets put ink to paper, poetry may have changed, but it hasn’t gotten any better.

John Roche, ed.

Doing Time to Cleanse My Mind , Battling Stereotypes – Vol 4, Issue 4

I have several projects going, including a chapbook of poems on the alphabet's history, and another of poems “writing off” various essays. But since the [presidential] election I have decided to start a “Poets Speak” series of small anthologies addressing the very daunting issues affecting our survival as a democracy and a species.

Jim Daniels Revolt of the Crash-test Dummies, EcoSolutions – Vol 5, Issue 2

I have two books coming out in 2017, Rowing Inland, Wayne State University Press, and Street Calligraphy, Steel Toe Books.

Rowing Inland contains mostly poems focused on Detroit and working-class life, while Street Calligraphy focuses a bit more on family life and being a parent.

Different books have inspired me at different times, but Jim Harrison’s book, Letters to Yesenin, probably affected me the most over an extended period of time because of both the subject matter — contemplating suicide — and the skillful use of the letter form in poetry. The book spoke to me as a young man and continues to speak to me over forty years later.

89

Scott Owens

Paternity,

Tailor-Made – Vol 5, Issue 3

Interestingly, the answers to these two questions are more cogent now than at any other time in my career. Galway Kinnell's Book of Nightmares has long been my favorite book of poetry and the one that I feel has influenced me the most in its weaving together reality, dream, history, association, and more. All of those elements have recently come together in my newest book, Down to Sleep, released by Main Street Rag in November. This book examines the impact of a childhood marked on the speaker's psyche by poverty, abuse, and neglect, as revealed in recurring, lifelong nightmares. It can be ordered at Main Street Rag’s bookstore. http://mainstreetragbookstore.com/?product=down-to-sleep

M. J. Iuppa

Within Reach, Vacation - Vol 6, Issue 2

In August 2016, my third full-length poetry collection Small Worlds Floating (Cherry Grove Collections) was released. This collection is the second in the trilogy of “Landscape as Informant” poems; Within Reach (Cherry Grove Collections) was the first, and forthcoming, is the third, This Thirst (Aldrich Press). Small Worlds Floating is receiving notice from poets and readers for its musicality and imagery, as it has been said: “The small things of the world become worldly themselves.”

Selecting one poetry collection that has made a difference in my own poetry is a difficult task. So I will pick two poets’ collections that possess a gardener’s sensibility. First is Stanley Kunitz’s Passing Through: The Later Poems, New and Selected (1995), which won the 90

National Book Award; and second is Louise Glück’s The Wild Iris (1992), which won a Pulitzer Prize in 1993. Both Kunitz and Glück use landscape to articulate their inner worlds using stark images that unlock the unflinching look at what is rarely said. I believe they instructed me in ways of seeing my own life — what is ahead of me, behind me, and standing beside me.

Tim Peeler

Checking Out, Nose Like a Cherry – Vol 6, Issue 3

My latest book is Wild in the Strike Zone: Baseball Poems (Rank Stranger Press), my third full-length book of baseball-related poems.

Leo Connellan, the irascible poet of the Maine lobster fishermen, was my earliest influence, and I still return to his work for inspiration.

Michael Meyerhofer

Pure Elysium ,

J Is for Jabberwocky – Vol 7, Issue 1

My latest poetry book is called What To Do If You’re Buried Alive (Split Lip Press). As the title hints, it has a lot of sardonic humor. I also like to incorporate odd facts into poems, hopefully keeping them accessible while still conveying my constant state of amazement.

One of the first poetry books I ever read was What the Living Do,

by Marie Howe. I’d grown up reading more formal verse, so Howe’s stark, bare-bones style was quite a surprise. But it really illustrates the power of simple language used with care and elegance.

91

Ken Pobo Gaywings, Chapter & Verse/Tech+Urban - Vol 7, Issue 2

I have a new book forthcoming from Circling Rivers press called Loplop in a Red City. The poems are all ekphrastic.

Bright Scythe: Selected Poems of Tomas Tranströmer; I love his poetry, and as a poet, his work is something to aspire to.

Scot Siegel

Thousands Flee California Wildflowers, Sinkhole - Vol 7, Issue 3

Salmon Poetry published The Constellation of Extinct Stars and Other Poems this year. It’s my best work. Mary Cisper’s review is in Terrain.org: http://www.terrain.org/2016/reviews-reads/the-constellation-of-extinct-stars/

I go to William Stafford’s The Way It Is: New and Selected Poems, published after his death, for its honesty, directness, sense of place, humor, connection to nature, and voice of conscience.

Author’s note: [I reviewed Stafford’s collection in Ephemera – Vol 4, Issue 1.]

Anne Whitehouse

The Refrain, Jeweled – Vol 8, Issue 2

92

Meteor Shower is my sixth collection of poetry and my second from Dos Madres Press.

I set out to make poetry from my everyday life that finds its place among the stars and in the mud at our feet, but I take poetry where I can find it, and sometimes the lives of others enter and take up residence in my heart.

The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats sing to me, speak to me, enliven my mind, awaken my senses, and pierce my heart. I wouldn’t know if I were inspired by them, because inspiration is largely unconscious, but I love Yeats’ poems, and they are always close to me.

William Heyen

Crazy Horse & the Custers: The River of Electricity, Exotique – Vol 9, Issue 3

I've a new book out from Etruscan Press called The Candle: Poems of Our Twentieth Century Holocausts. It holds almost 50 years of my writing on historical atrocities, poems and prose having to do primarily with the Shoah, but also with Hiroshima, Viet Nam, and the Gulf War. Samuel Bak's cover painting, "The Reader," is itself worth the price of admission, I believe.

As I put The Tao of Reading Poetry on hold for the foreseeable future, I’m reminded of the American poet, post-trauma specialist and Jungian psychoanalyst Clarissa Pinkola Estés, who strikes this note of optimism: “Struggling souls catch light from other souls who

93

are fully lit and willing to show it. If you would help to calm the tumult, this is one of the strongest things you can do.�

Or, as I’ve written to so many of you, fellow poets, over the years, reminding you to catch the light and: Write on. . . .

Karla Linn Merrifield, National Park Artist-in-Residence, has had 600 poems appear in dozens of journals and anthologies. She has 12 books to her credit, the newest of which is Bunchberries, More Poems of Canada, a sequel to Godwit: Poems of Canada (FootHills), which received the Eiseman Award for Poetry.

She is assistant editor and poetry book reviewer for The Centrifugal Eye [I refuse to resign], a member of the board of directors of Just Poets (Rochester, NY), and a member of the New Mexico State Poetry Society and the Florida State Poetry Society. She is currently at work on three manuscripts and seeking a home for The Comfort of Commas, a quirky chapbook that pays tribute to punctuation. Visit her woefully outdated blog, Vagabond Poet: http://karlalinn.blogspot.com.

94

“Night Lights in Rain” by D. J. Bryant, 2017

95

Announcements Books Books Books Books Books Books Books Books Books Gary Beck has two books: Perceptions, a poetry collection from Winter Goose Publishing, and a novel, Call to Valor, from Gnome on Pig Productions. Both books are available from the publishers and Amazon (http://wintergoosepublishing.com/) (https://gnomeonpigproductions.wordpress.com/).

Montréal publisher 8th House Publishing just released Darren C. Demaree’s sixth collection, Many Full Hands Applauding Inelegantly. You’ll find it at http://8thhousepublishing.com/ and Amazon.

Lynn Hoffman’s Philadelphia Poems is now out from Kelsay Books; visit http://kelsaybooks.com/home or Amazon.

Now available from its publisher, The Aldrich Press (http://aldrichbookpublishing.blogspot.com/), is Tricia Knoll’s Ocean's Laughter, a book of lyric and eco-poetry about Manzanita, Oregon. Her poetry chapbook, Urban Wild, is available from Finishing Line Press: https://www.finishinglinepress.com/. Also through Amazon.

James B. Nicola has a new book out from WordTech Communications; it’s Stage to Page: Poems from the Theater, and is available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and the author at nicolajamesb@juno.com.

B. Z. Niditch’s Everything, Everywhere, a collection of “calendar poems” from Penhead Press, is available from the publisher: http://penhead-press.com/, as well as at Amazon.

Scot Siegel’s The Constellation of Extinct Stars: And Other Poems was published by Salmon Poetry (http://salmonpoetry.com/) and is available there, and at Amazon.

Jessica Goody reports that her book, Defense Mechanisms, was recently released

by Phosphene Publishing. The collection is available at Phosphene: http://www.phosphenepublishing.com/goody-jessica and Amazon.

96

Gram Joel Davies’ debut collection, Bolt Down This Earth, is due out March 2017, forthcoming from V. Press: http://vpresspoetry.blogspot.ca/p/bookshop.html.

Back Issues Back Issues Back Issues Back Issues Back Issues The Centrifugal Eye has been around for more than 11 years. Much of the work published during that time is still available for view on Issuu.com, and a representative selection of the first 5 years has been collected into an anthology (see http://tinyurl.com/TCE5YRAnthol for details).

During the past 8 years, all, but one, of our issues have also been made available as print-on-demand editions through Lulu.com. If you’d like to pick up print copies, please visit our TCE Storefront sponsored by Lulu Press: http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/centrifugaleye.

2017: This year, TCE will be putting together its 10th-Anniversary anthology to commemorate the past 5+ years of continued excellence in published poetry. And we thank you, our readers and contributors, both, for being part of TCE’s glorious history.

Also in 2017, The Centrifugal Eye’s editor-in-chief and volunteer staff will begin a 2-year break from publication of the journal. During this time, staff members will pursue various personal projects of their own. It is possible that TCE will resume as a poetry journal sometime in 2019/20; however, it may evolve in some other artistic fashion, depending on developments during hiatus.

Thank you for your loyal readership.

97

The Centrifugal Eye Authors — A Decade of Poems, Reviews, and Essays* *While we tried to be comprehensive, this list may contain inaccuracies or have omissions.

Aarnes, William (Nov. ’10): “Ode to the Gale’s Wild Blueberries,” “Ode to Summer” Acers, Kevin (Spr./Sum. ’13): “Digital Communication in the Dinosaur Age,” “Alien Diplomacy” Acuff, Gale (May ’06): “Livestock” Albert, C. (Nov.’09): “Million Dollar Views,” “Aloha Street;” (May’10): “Today Her Name is Annie;” (Aug.’10): “Her Shirt,” “His Shirt” Alfredson, Murray (Spr./Sum. ’13): “You Laughed Aloud,” “No matter were it quilled” Allen, Gilbert (Apr. ’11): “The Prozac® Poems” Allen, Penelope (Nov. ’06): “Dogwood Drive;” (Nov. ’07): “C-eh-N-eh-D-eh” (collaboration) Allman, Jr., James E. (May ’10): “Anatomy of a Sock Turned Inside Out” Alonso, Raciel (Feb. ’06): “I Dream of Venus” Alvarez, Steven (Aut. ’12): “Transnation Translation” (mini-chapbook) Ames, Daniel (Nov. ’08): “Alter” Anderson, Paula D. (May ’10): “Sounds” Ansky, Iliya (Feb. ’10): “Sarajevo, 11 a.m.”

Ashley, Allen (Wint/Spr. ’14): “Answers on a Postcard” Ayers, Lana Hechtman (Feb. ’06): “Gardening is Design in the 4 th Dimension;” (Feb. ’07): “Red Riding Hood Dreams of Another Winter: the beaten path, that goes..., the road less traveled, where..., off-road, no path at all, except...” (Nov. ’08): “Red Riding Hood Paints While the Wolf Sleeps;” (Wint. ’16): “Burnt Love” Balistreri, Mary Jo (Spr./Sum. ’13): “Rocky III,” “Soft Hands;” (Wint/Spr. ’14): “What You Left Me;” (Wint. ’16): “Morning Tea,” “Rain” Ballard, Jon (Nov. ’06): “Northern Town Twilight,” “Spillage,” “Coming to Know,” “Keeping Company;” “In the Grey House: Writing Toward the Metaphorical Past” (essay) Bargar, Cynthia (Aug. ’07): “U as in Undertaker” Barker, Bambi (Aug. 08): “Flight of Fantasy” Barker, Michelle (May ’10): “Working Forest,” “Skedans,” “Old Soul Tree;” (Nov. ’10): “Spring Thaw,” “Late August;” “The Season of Yes” (essay); (Apr. ’11): “Enviro,” “Treed Community,” “Reading Poetry to Cows;” (Wint.’12): “Fear,” “Angel and the Burnt Man,” “In the Sunlight at the Window;” (Aut. ’12): “Glimpsing the Stars” (mini-chapbook); (Sum. ’14): “Mystical and Earthy: The Paradox of Writing” (essay), “Pose,” “In the Beginning Was the Word,” “Satori,” “All the Cool Kids Are Buddhists Now” Barnes, Christopher (Aut. ’12): “Film-making: Western Screens” Barnes, David-Matthew (Nov. ’08): “Caution” Bayless, Laura (Spr. ’16): “Stones” Beck, Christine (Aut. ’12): “The Charlotte Chronicles” (mini-chapbook) Beck, Gary (Nov. ’08): “Past Sighting;” (Feb. ’09): “Crumbling Road” Belfiglio, Gabriella M. (May ’07): “Our Sisters” Bell, Bridget (Nov. ’09): “Barmaid,” “‛Ahia’” Bellehumeur-Allatt, Tanya (Nov. ’10): “Cross Country;” (Wint.’12): “First Fire;” (Spr./Sum. ’13): “Beyond Repair;” (Aut. ’13): “Wounded Bison Drawn on a Cave Wall 15,000 BC;” (Wint/Spr. ’14): “Interruption;” (Sum./Aut. ’15): “Foot Massage” Benedict, Kate Bernadette (Aug. ’08): “The Intruder,” “Continuous Play,” “Opening Night” Bennett, Carolee (aka Sherwood, Carolee Bennett) (May ’10): “I am lost,” “The romantic fantasizes about being inseparable from her lover...,” “Revision;” (Aug. ’10): “My God! The Tailor...”

Berg, Carol (Aug. ’10): “Carol” Bernstein, Jeff (Wint./Spr. ’15): “When the Perseids Met the Leonids” Bien, Annie (Feb. ’07): “Secrets below Mirror Lake” Bittner, Russell (Feb. ’06): “Coïtus,” “Oh heart weighed down by so many wings” (essay); (Nov. ’06): “A Body May With Wit Rebel,” “August,” “September;” (Nov. ’09): “So, This Is How Old Forests Feel;” (Aut. ’12): “‘Oh, East Is East, and West Is West’ — as None But Novelists Know Best” (essay) Black, R. L. (Wint. ’16): “The Dream,” “Channeling Mother”

98

Blasko, Danielle (Nov. ’09): “Breaking Down the Blues” (review); (Aug. ’10): “Anthology Craftwork: PieceMeal Quilting for Editors” (review); (Aut. ’11): “Before Widowhood: No Vacancy Here” (review); (Wint. ’12): “Because You Yearned for Snow in Atlanta;” (Wint/Spr. ’14): “Reclamation,” “Definition,” “At the Market Common” Blaeuer, Mark (Spr./Sum. ’12): “Fable,” “Symphony in Earth Flat,” “Collected” Bosacker, Gerald (Feb. ’08): “Bug Dinners,” “Don’t Serve Me Grits;” (May ’08): “My Father’s Car,” “Miracle Paleontology” Bourret, Len (Nov. ’06): “Rhapsody: A Songwriter's Rhythm” (essay); (Feb. ’07): “Savoring the Green Corn Dance” (essay); (Aug. ’07): “Correct, Different, Same, or Similar?” (essay); (Feb. ’08): “Nickelodeons,” “Salvation Street;” (Aug. ’08): “Sun God Surrenders;” (May ’09): “What is it about understanding that you do — or don't?” (essay) Bowles, Jennifer Hollie (Feb. ’10): “We are who we are creating who we are,” “Commitment” Braver, Seth (Spr./Sum. ’12): “Dappelgänger” Breden, William (Spr./Sum. ’13): “This imbroglio is less than phenomenal” Bredthauer, Bredt (Sum./Aut. ’15): “On Visiting Madame Tussaud” Bridgeman, Randolph (Aug. ’06): “Wichita,” “Some Assembly Required” Britt, Alan (Aug. ’10): “Ode to the Hudson” Brooks, Dianne (Nov. ’05): "Tummy Trouble" Brugaletta, John J. (Wint/Spr. ’14): “Love vs. Duty” Bruhmuller, Marjorie (Feb. ’10): “Crow,” “The Blues;” (Apr. ’11): “Ides” Bryan, John (Feb. ’06): “Flavor 4 – 2” Bryant, Dallas J. (Nov. ’05): “Lifting” “Never Out of Place” (essay); (Nov. ’06): “Brevity Magnified: A Review of Joy Harold Helsing’s Faceted Eye” (review); (Feb. ’08): “Bread at Every Meal: Leland Jamieson’s 21st Century Bread (review); (Nov. ’08) Mercurial Fig: Michaela Sefler’s Healing Tree, a collection of mystical poems (review); (Aug. ’09): “Vaulting the Gate” (essay); (Aut. ’12): “‘Reflections on Rummaging’” (review) Buckner, Pandem (Nov. ’05): “Ukemi” Burch, Michael R. (Aug. ’06): “Of Civilization and Disenchantment,” “Nashville and Andromeda,” “Resignation and Resolution” Byrne, John (May ’09): “’You Don’t Negotiate with Gravity’*,” “Spring Cleaning;” (Nov. ’09): “Scandal,” “They’re Thieves” Calhoun, Harry (Feb. ’10): “Not Hannibal,” “Longhand” Calhoun, Jeffrey (Nov. ’05): "The Makings of a World Champion Speller;" (Feb ’06): “Electrocuting a Philosopher;” (Feb. ’07): “Escaping Winter,” “Anywhere But Home,” “Vapors;” (May ’08): “Notes from the Apollo Space Flight” Callin, David (Aut. ’11): “Lunch with Leopardi” Campbell, John L. (May ’08): “Dying to Celebrate;” (Aug. ’08): “Measuring Up” (essay); (Feb. ’09): “I Want to Be” Campbell, Kate (Aug. ’07): “i don’ like my dad,” “Safe from Suffering” Carl, Melissa (Wint/Spr. ’14): “From a Mostly Forgotten Word,” “From a Wanting,” “From a Dream,” “From the Trenches;” (Wint. ’16): “Brackdrop 1,” “Backdrop 2,” “The Island of Dolls” Carr, Fern G. Z. (Wint. ’12): “Scents and Scentsibility;” (Aut. ’13): “Grande Dame of the Carbons;” (Wint/Spr. ’14): “Return to Sender” Carrington, Patrick (Feb. ’06): “Upstairs at O’Reilly’s,” “Voyeur;” (Aug. ’08): “One of the Crowd,” “Resisting the Pull” Carter, Jared (May ’06): “Snake Plant,” “Grandmother,” “Eating the Bones,” “Crocks;” “Last Journey” (essay) Carter, Laura (Wint. ’12): “Second Self” Carty, Jessie (Aug. ’10): “Oh Telemarketer” Castlegrant, Donna E. (Nov. ’05): “Occupied Jabalya” Chaffin, C. E. (Aug. ’08): “Radiated,” “The Dust of Guanajato;” (Feb. ’09): “Signal,” “How They Marveled;” (May ’10): “Leaf Sermon,” “The Junk Drawer,” “Dumpster” Chambers, Cheryl (Nov. ’06): “Toe Picker,” “The Cocktail Waitress,” “I Had a Dream About Paris Hilton Last Night” Chandler, Catherine (Nov. ’07): “Of Diminished Things;” (Aug. ’09): “Beach Dogs,” “Quills,” “Mission,” “Lost and Found,” “Tomboy;” “An Uninvited Guest or How Puff, the Magic Dragon Almost Ended My Poetic Career” (essay)

99

Chorlton, David (Feb. ’09): “Letter to John Clare” Christensen, Bryce (May ’09): “John von Neumann,” “Alamogordo” Christy, Elizabeth Juden (Wint. ’16): “Autotomy*,” “Spring Descent into a Dying Sea,” “Self-Portrait as Egg” Ciraolo, Laura A. (Feb. ’08): “On the Day of the Dead;” (May ’08): “Last Will and Testament;” (Feb. ’09): “About Bees;” (May ’10): “The strategy of seeds;” (Aut. ’11): “What Should Never Be in Poems” Clark, Antonia (Feb. ’09): “Ephemera;” (May ’09): “String Theory With Cat,” “Coming of Age in the Physical World” Clark, Jennifer (Aut. ’11): “Where Is Norman Rockwell When You Need Him?” Clark, John Thomas (Nov. ’07): “Ottawa, Your Goose Is Cooked;” (Feb. ’08): “Singing for my Supper;” (May ’08): “Life and Death on Planet Earth,” “Black Lights;” (Nov. ’08): “A Do-Over,” “No Bed of Roses;” (Feb. ’09): “At a Loss for Words” Coleman, Mira (Aug. ’08): “Leaving a Space” Cook, Nancy L. (Wint. ’16): “Las Lágrimas,” “On Seeing Shakespeare Performed in Stratford-Upon-Avon” Copeland, K. R. (Nov. ’05): "The earth is a decapitated head and somewhere its body dwells,” "Why Flutes and Mirrors Can't Fix Your House;" (May ’07): “Dear Sylvia,” “Dinner with Ms. Brooks;” (Feb. ’09): “From Moonrise to Dewfall,” “The Aftermath of Magic,” “Sentinel Infidelity,” “When the Written Word Conjures Concupiscence,” “More (or Less) than Breakfast” “Poetry: Permanent Ink or Impertinent Art Form?” (essay); (Aug. ’10): “Sew On and Sew On and So On” Cowtan, Cheryl R. (Nov. ’05): “Nothing Left But Tradition,” “The Hierarchy of Reincarnation,” “Either Way, the Poetic Sway” (essay); (Nov. ’07): “ON Commuting Views” Crew, Christopher (Wint. ’16): “Adjudicated Youth” Crew, Louie (Nov. ’05): “Calling all epic seers,” “Missionary Zeal” Crittenden, Chris (Feb. ’10): “A Midsummer Night's Glee,” “The Gods Explain A Failed Universe;” (May ’10): “Spruce Rising,” “Final Hug,” “Last Ride;” “The Fluid Looking-Glass” (essay) Crook, Seth (Aut. ’12): “Reference (or Subject Matter),” “R Is for Regress;” (Spr./Sum. ’13): “The Way of the Toe;” (Sum. ’14): “High Winds;” (Wint./Spr. ’15): “The Time Tree,” “Feet on the Sun Lounge Roof,” “Memo from the Short-Eared Owls on the Road along Loch Scridain,” “The man made of moss” Cunningham, Mark (May ’08): “Green Flash,” “Orion;” (Aug. ’09): “Ellsworth Kelly,” “Pisces” Dale, Kathleen (Wint./Spr. ’13): “Sonata,” “She Folds Laundry,” “Evergreen,” “I Am the Witch,” “We Only Think We Choose” (essay) Daley, Tom (Aug. ’10): “To Mima’s Vase” Davies, Gram Joel (Feb. ’06): “A Reading From the Book of Change – Duration and The Well;” (May ’06): “Into the Ticking Heart - an excursion into Jared Carter’s Cross this Bridge at a Walk” (review); (Aug. ’06): “Darkness and White Chocolate – venturing through Simon Armitage’s Cloudcuckooland” (review); (Feb. ’07): “Custom,” “To Bury Your Darkling Face,” “Transparent Meaning;” (Nov. ’08): “Sky Lanterns;” (Feb. ’09): “A Feather on the Breath of God: A Review of Gary Metras’ Poem (in chapbook form), Francis d’Assisi” (essay); (Wint. ’12): “A Funk of Weather Turns;” (Sum. ’14): “A Silted Thing: ...” (review); (Wint./Spr. ’15): “How Many Nights?,” “Catherine Chandler’s Glad and Sorry Seasons” (review); (Wint. ’16): “Bunchberries: A Review, in Tribute to…Merrifield…” (review) Davis, Donna M. (Nov. ’09): “The Biddy Bus;” (Sum./Aut. ’15): “Lola Montez” Davis, Nicelle (Aug. ’09): “Chick Fights and Heartbreaks” Davis, Paul R. (Aug. ’09): “Ascension” Day, Holly (Aut. ’12): “Summer 1985” de Boer, Geordie (Aug. ’10): “A-knit-omy,” “In Medias Res Into Ars Poetica” del Dardano Turann, Santiago (May ’08): “The Pigeon’s Tale;” (Aug. ’09): “Eros Awakening” Demaree, Darren C. (Aug. ’09): “Black & White Picture #112” Demaree, Robert (May ’09 ): “At the Science Center” Denenberg, Risa (Wint./Spr. ’13): “Reverse-origami,” “Take Heaps of Notes,” In the Time of Novels” Diggles, Tim (Apr. ’11): “A Tale of the Children I Never Had;” (Wint./Spr. ’13): “Macbeth at the Writers Group” Dima, Radu (Aug. ’07): “ramshackle song;” (May ’08): “ex nihilo” Dixon, Mary Marie (May ’10): “The Lady’s Mantle,” “The Vagabond Heart” Dodds, Colin (Sum./Aut. ’15): “Into the Lightning”

100

Doreski, William (Nov. ’07): “Howling with the Wolf Pack;” (Feb. ’09): “A Hideous Verb,” “Writing on the Wall,” “Two Ideas About a Garden;” (Spr./Sum. ’12): “Yeats and the Ghost Machine,” “Computers Go Crazy;” (Sum. ’14): “Gnome Tracks” Dorris, Bill (Aug. ’07): “Ironworkers,” “Windmills;” “Heroes & Mud” (essay); (Nov. ’09): “The Price of Coal,” “Tegulcigalpa;” (Spr./Sum. ’13): “Iambic Solutions” Dorris-Jefferson, Shavahn (Nov. ’09): “This is Jezebel” Dowd, Juditha (Apr. ’11): “Ours Poetica” Dunbar, Simon Lloyd (Nov. ’05): “Sins of the anti-Father;” (Aug. ’06): “You Won’t Believe What Simon Says” (review); (Aug. ’07): How is a Man’s Life Measured? A review of Patricia Wellingham-Jones’ End-Cycle: poems about caregiving (review); (Feb. ’08): “Single Diner’s Menu: Jon Ballard’s Lonesome” (review) Eccles, Lenard W. (Nov. ’08): “Sea o’ Glasse” Egan, Laury A. (Aug. ’08): “On Waking;” (Feb. ’09): “Dusk, December,” “Nature, in Three Bites;” (Aut. ’11): “Leaving;” (Spr./Sum. ’13): “Swept into ‘Green Water Pastures’” (review); (Aut. ’13): “A Wealth of Things” Eisenhart, Gail (Spr./Sum. ’12): “The Apple of Her Eye;” (Aut. ’12): “Ode to a Dying Diva;” (Spr./Sum. ’13): “Double-speak;” (Sum./Aut. ’15): “A Trailblazer’s Chronicle of Castles” Ellis, Phillip A. (Wint./Spr. ’13): “Near Spring, Near the Coral Sea” Elster, Martin (Nov. ’10): “Spring Peepers;” (Spr./Sum. ’12): “Tryst on a Torus,” “Rover Finds a Graviton,” “Photo of Ms. Charlotte Camelopardalis Sporting the Magnificent Ring Nebula;” (Wint./Spr. ’13): “In the Basement” Engle, Margarita (Aug. ’06): “Rural Sculptors,” “Tropical Hunger,” “The Origins of Agriculture,” “Noon Owl; (May ’07): “The Prayers of Wild Roses,” “Alphabets;” (Nov. ’07): “Maple Leaf Haiku:,” “The Underground City,” “The Airports of Canada” Estabrook, Michael (May ’06): “Arguably the Best American Poet Ever,” “Cowls and Straw;” (May ’07): “Allen Ginsberg,” “Joel Barlow;” (Aug. ’07): “Bread, Milk, and Eggs,” “Great Silken Net” Estes, Trace (Nov. ’05): “On the Cusp of December,” “Dust Cloud,” “Burning Oxygen,” “Sticking it to the Monkey,” “The Hollow Empty” Fein, Richard (May ’06): “Masculine Lies, “Reflections on a Madison Avenue Bus,” “Matriphagy,” “Fecund Field Seduction;” (Feb. ’08): “Poor, Lonely Ms. Muse;” (May ’08): “Death’s True Image;” (Spr./Sum. ’12): “In Memory of Me;” (Wint. ’16): “The Joys of Outliving Everybody” Fisher, Paul (May ’08): “Incantation and Sense: Isabella Gardner’s When a Warlock Dies” (essay); “Ghost,” “The Petrified Wife,” “Sasquatch Speaks,” “Tyger Burning;” (Feb. ’09): “Shapeshifter,” “Snowflakes;” (Aug. ’09): “The Sun Again,” “Middle Age;” (Nov. ’10): “The Velocity of Autumn,” “Cusp;” “The Contradictory Tilt” (essay); (Spr./Sum. ’13): “Forewarned,” “Contemplating the F Bomb” Fisk, Brent (May ’07): “Dickey’s Deliverance” (essay); (Aug. ’07): “To Good Homes,” “Runaway;” (May ’08): “Four Hour Visit, Eight Hour Drive” (essay); (Feb. ’09): “Broken Shell” FitzSimons, Casey (Sum. ’14): “On Rectangles,” “Henge” Flynn, C. (Aut.’11): “Going Home” Flynn, John (Aut. ’13): “Super Flea” Forman, David (Wint./Spr. ’15): “Reading about the Soul’s Journey” Fortino, Carol (Feb. ’06): “Hot Winds Blown Dry” Fowler, Susi Gregg (Nov’10): “Letting Go” Fox, Hugh (May ’07): “Happy Birthday,” “Walking Around;” (May ’08): “La Vie Boheme Seder;” (Feb. ’09): “All;” “One” (essay); (Nov. ’10): “Loving” Frakes, Clint (Aug. ’08): “Paradise Confession;” (Nov. ’08): “Kaliyuga I;” (May ’09): “Kaliyuga II” Freed, Richard C. (Wint./Spr. ’13): “It Can Be Imagined” Freeman, Linda McCauley (Wint. ’16): “Passing By,” “Airborne” Gabriel, Michaela A. (Aug. ’06): “Central Cemetery,” “Vienna;” (Nov. ’10): “026: iron (fe),” “august” Gabriel, Zoë (Aug. ’06): “Hibernation;” (Aug. ’07): “An Ideal Husband;” (May ’09): “Stephen Hawking in My Kitchen;” (Nov. ’10): “The Muse in March,” “December” Gaffney, Larry (May ’08): “Voyeurs from Beyond the Grave,” “Stop the Wheel” Gage-Dixon, Bridget (Aut. ’11): “The Day You Died” Gallagher, Liz (Nov.’06): “Meet Me at a Confluence Point,” “A Washing Machine Repair-Man Speaks on Poetry” Galloway, Lucia (Aut. ’13): “Journeying Alone in Assisi;” (Spr. ’16): “To a Bathrobe”

101

Garni, Ricky (Feb. ’06): “My World of the Barking Dog,” “It’s Only a Milk,” “3 Horrible Things I am Afraid of:” Garrison, Brian (Wint./Spr. ’15): “Heights” Good, Howie (Aug. ’07): “Job Interview Tips;” (Feb. ’08): “Love During Wartime,” “The Audition,” “Snapdragon, Clawhammer;” (Aug. ’09): “Unexplained Lights” Goodman, John C. (Nov. ’07): “Newfoundland” Goody, Jessica (Wint. ’16): “Jazz,” “Bruegel’s Bride” Gordon, Ralph (Wint./Spr. ’13): “The Inland Whale” Graham, Taylor (Nov. ’06): “Dump,” “Fossils,” “Home for the Holidays;” (Aug. ’08): “Etude in Black and Moonlight,” “How to Survive His Stay in Hospital,” “Roadkill,” “Autumn’s Eve,” “In the Shadow of Denali;” “Poetry and the Rummage Sale” (essay); (Spr./Sum. ’13): “Graffiti,” “Without Prejudice” Greenbaum-Maya, Karen (Aut. ’11): “To Die in Cochabamba (I will Not Die in Paris),” “My Patient Invites Me to Visit Her;” (Aut. ’12): “Floating Route” (mini-chapbook); (Wint./Spr. ’13): “Spice of Life;” (Aut. ’13): “Perspective;” (Sum. ’14): “Opioid Withdrawal/Total Eclipse;” (Sum./Aut. ’15): “Dayenu/Genug,” “The Art of Coin Fishing;” (Wint. ’16): “Disputing on a Snowy Evening” Grellas, Carol Lynn (Aug. ’09): “Meet Me in the Countryside,” “Inconsolable” Grey, John (May ’06): “Miss Virginia 1935;” (May ’07): “At 15, I Reach This Great Understanding;” (May ’08): “Look on the Bleak Side,” “The Secrets of Fire;” (May ’09): “Mr. And Mrs. Eats;” (Feb. ’10): “Your Document Failed to Print;” (Spr. ’16): “Art Attack,” “The Chopin and Liszt” Gruis, Phil (Nov. ’10): “Spire,” “Tableau in Winter Gray,” “Pleas of the Naked Poet;” (Apr. ’11): “What crows know” Gurney, Kenneth P. (Nov. ’06): “In Its Autumn Tint of Gold,” “Editing;” (May ’07): “Lisa begins with today;” (Aug. ’07): “Three Months After;” (Nov. ’07): “Wait for the Port Angeles Ferry;” (Feb. ’08): “Pen Stroke Hospital Ice Cream Rush,” “Communal Solitude,” “Shower;” (Aug. ’09): “Fluid Shape of an Empty Womb;” (Feb. ’10): “Amy’s Hair Looks Like So Much Grass” Gurus, Lauren Finaldi (Feb. ’06): “Miscarriage,” “Or I'll stay home” Guzzi, Deborah (Spr. ’16): “untitled tanka,” “untitled haiku” Hale, Pat (Aut. ’11): “Dead Reckoning,” “Clearing Things Up,” “Going South;” (Wint/Spr. ’14): “Giving Thanks,” “A Snake in the Cupboard” Hanninen, Eve Anthony (May ’06): “Incomprehensible Triangles” (essay); (Aug. ’06): “An Ideal City — the not-so still-life in Camille Norton’s Corruption” (review); (Feb. ’07): “Looking for Henry in Michael: A review of Michael K. Gause’s I Want to Look Like Henry Bataille” (review); (Nov. ’07): “Liquid from the Pickle Jar,” “Spirit of Haida Gwaii,” “Edvard Visits In Memoriam;” (May ’08): “In the Here and Now of Spoken Word Poetry: David Francis’ Poems” (review); (Apr. ’11): “A Tang Like a Hawk on the Tongue” (essay); (Aut. ’11): “Signs of Vacancy” (essay); (Wint. ’12): “If a Man Has Two Pennies…” (essay); (Spr./Sum. ’12): “The Fictions of Science in Poetry” (essay); (Wint./Spr. ’13): “Floundering in a Whirlpool: When the Muck Keeps Getting Muckier” (essay); (Spr./Sum. ’13): “It’s How You Say It” (essay); (Aut. ’13): “Glints off Sunlit Water” (essay); (Wint/Spr. ’14): “The Evolving Language of Postcards;” (Wint./Spr. ’15): “There’s a Bigger Story in Here, Somewhere” (essay); (Sum./Aut. ’15): “Unfamiliar Territory” (essay); (Spr. ’16): “Packing & Unpacking” (essay); (Wint. ’16): “Borrowed Poems, Inspired Journeys” (essay) Harrell, Mike (Apr. ’11): “A Moratorium on Moons,” “An Elephant at this Distance,” “Loser,” “The Extra;” “A Few Shots of Bitter” (essay) Harris, Barry (Aug. ’06): “His Urban Beach,” “Sixteen Omars,” “What Tressie Taught,” “Midnight Farmer” Hartman, Michelle (Aut. ’12): “A Stranger in a Strange Land” Hatfield, Brad (Aug. ’08): “Juárez Night” Heaton, Kevin (Wint. ’12): “An Unconventional Union” Hegnauer, Patricia (Feb. ’06): “Disturbance Caused by a Visitor” Helfgott, Esther Altshul (Aug. ’06): “Leash Law: They Said, I Said, She Said,” “No Pits;” “Writing and the Alzheimer’s Caregiver” (essay) Helsing, Joy Harold (Nov. ’06): “Tetons,” “Cow's Day Out;” (May ’07): “Happily Ever After;” (Aug. ’07): “Thrift,” “Hobby;” (Nov. ’07): “Inukshuk;” (Feb. ’08): “the elephants next door,” “Saki Song” Hermann, Claire (Wint. ’16): “Reading W. S. Merwin in the Laundromat” Higgins, Anne (Nov. ’05): “The Scar;” (May ’07): “One Word Singing;” (May ’08): “Rules for Action in the Garden”

102

Higgins, Ed (Aug. ’06): “Night Grazing,” “Solstice,” (May ’07): “For Allen Ginsberg;” (Feb. ’09): “Desk Drawer Labyrinth,” Higley, Sarah (May ’09): “Descartes’ Automaton” Hodson, Jnana (Nov. ’05): "Clearing the Air," "Some Good Shovels" Hoffman, Alicia (Feb. ’08): “This Earth is Not a Novel” Hoffman, Lynn (Nov. ’10): “february— carpenter’s woods,” “the grasshopper in October;” (Spr./Sum. ’12): “addison street 19148;” (Aut. ’12): “Elegy for a Quatrain,” “Poets Drunk;” (Aut. ’13): “The Letter J” Holmes, Tom (May ’08): “The Storm,” “A Creation Story;” (May ’09): “Chromolinguistics,” “Three Voices of Creation” Hostovsky, Paul (Aut. ’11): “Geographic Tongue;” (Wint./Spr.’13): “Die Bieden,” “The Untied Stales,” On Adversity,” “Escape Artist,” “Peevish” Houle, Melanie (May ’08): “The Aviator’s Rendezvous,” “Invocations,” “Requiem for a Murderer” Howell, Bryon D. (May ’07): “The Literary Fugitive,” “And I Think it's Going to Be a Long, Long Time, Tribute to Sir Elton John” Howell-Sinnard, Billy (May ’06): “The State Won't Pay for Alapa’i Hanapi,” “Crazy White Man Parked At The End Of A Dirt Road,” “Dust,” “Crickets And Bees;” (Apr. ’11) “two natures,” “The Youngest,” “On the Lanai with God” Howells, Ann (Aut. ’11): “Something, Perhaps, by Sophocles,” “Crossing Pentland Firth” Hudgins, Lauren (Wint/Spr. ’14): “Your Invisible Girlfriend” Huffman, A. J. (Aut. ’13): “With Ruby” Huffstickler, Albert (Feb. ’06): “The Search,” “Saturday Morning, Café Du Jour,” “Déjà Vu;” (May ’06): “Mortal Wounds” Huffstickler Tribute (Feb. ’06): “Punctuation” — Joseph Farley; Dedications by Linda Aschbrenner, John Berbrich, Robert Bixby, Michael Estabrook, Beth (Huffstickler) Fraser, Doug Holder, Christopher M., Louis McKee, Todd Moore, Charles P. Ries, Joseph Shields Ikins, Rachael Z. (Spr./Sum. ’12): “Black Bear in Cave beneath New Moon: Midnight” Iuppa, M.J. (Aug. ’07): “Hypnotic— ,” “Awakened, hours before dawn, rain;” (Feb. ’08): “Winter’s Conceit,” “Among the Missing,” “Evidence;” (Aug. ’08): “Full Moon,” “Touch-and-Go;” (Aug. ’09): “What She’s Waiting For,” “I tell you, it’s real:,” “Portrait of Lighthouse with Irises;” (May ’10): “Past Due;” (Wint. ’12): “A Clearing,” “Not Sleeping” Ives, Rich (Feb. ’10): “Psychotherapy,” “Gentleman Farmer,” “Praise the One Thing Weakened by Complexity” Jaimot, Zyskander A. (Nov. ’07): “Does It Matter to the Zamboni? (Year 2000);” (Feb. ’08): “Pampered Plumage,” “Feast Day” Jamieson, Leland (Feb. ’07): “Winter Whimsies;” (May ’07): “We’re Bondsmen All;” (Aug. ’07): “Coffee Break?,” “Scotsman’s Prophecy;” (Aug. ’08): “The Squeezer” Jansen, Bill (May ’10): “You Won’t Be There;” (Aug. ’10): “Music for Periscope and Orchestra” Jarvis, Andrew (Sum. ’14): “Plank House” Jean, Ted (Aug. ’10): “Deep Weed Theory” Jewett, Bruce (Nov. ’05): "Upon Taking Maryanne to Lunch and a Flower Shop on a July Day," "On the Telephone during a Storm" Johnson, Michael Lee (May ’07): “I Work My Mind Like Planet Earth” Jones, M. P., IV (Wint. ’12): “Ragweed” Jones, Patricia Wallace (May ’10): “Our Lady Under Pressure” Jospé, Kitty (Apr. ’11): “For the Time Being, Mona Lisa* Says;” (Wint. ’12): “Somewhat After Machado,” “What Remains;” (Spr./Sum. ’12): “The Witch of Hardscrabble Hill;” (Wint./Spr. ’13): “Woman & Man;” (Wint/Spr. ’14): “Meditation on the Writing Life with Postcards” (essay); (Wint/Spr. ’14): “It’s fine on this island,” “Posted North” Karami, Siham (Sum. ’14): “Losing Count,” “And the stars and trees prostrate themselves …;” (Wint. ’16): “EastWest Highway,” “Double Helix” Kiahsobyk, Jeremy (Nov. ’06:): “Blood and Stones;” (Feb. ’10): “Mother Goose was a Mayhem Moose” Keith, Kim (Aug. ’10): “A Key to Locks” Kieth, Kathy (Nov. ’06): “Skyways: A Review” (review)

103

Kingston, Maureen (Aut. ’11): “Ukiyo-e,” “Wildflowers,” “Celeste Figs,” “Repetitive Motion Injury,” “Red River of the North;” “The Road to Damascus by Way of the Great Plains” (essay); (Wint./Spr. ’15): “The Skeleton Coast,” “Ceci n’est pas un poème. And yet…” (essay) Klein, Jill (Wint. ’12): “An Ode to Memory” Klepetar, Steve (Wint. ’16): “Fire at Grave Lake,” “Yukon Light and Shadow” Kline, LeAnne (Feb. ’08): “The Drum Circle” Klingensmith, Chet (May ’09): “The Dwindle Days” Knight, Mandi (Feb. ’10): “Dis-leck-see-ya: What I See is Not What You Get” (essay) Knoll, Tricia (Aut. ’13): “Scrumptious Words” Kobylarz, Philip (Aut. ’12): “Figurative,” “To Destinations” Korolog, George (Aut. ’12): “Crumbs of Paper in the Jungle” Kovacic, Kristin (Nov.’09): “Ms. Um Makes an Announcement” Krapf, Norbert (Apr. ’11): “Angel in Drag” Kravitz, Sarah (Wint./Spr. ’13): “Flying Fish” Lader, Bruce (May ’10): “How to Bring a Marriage Good Luck,” “In a Previous Life” Lagier, Jennifer (Aug. ’06): “Rehab Commencement,” “Low Tide I-Ching,” “Sleeping with the Cat,” “Swept Off My Feet by Montaña de Oro,” “Beach Cipher;” “Nature as Muse” (essay); (Aug. ’07): “Patriotism,” “Malignancy;” (Wint./Spr. ’13): “Hard Frost;” (Wint/Spr. ’14): “Valley Fever;” (Spr. ’16): “The Edge” Lamothe, Lori (Sum. ’14): “While Writing a Poem Glass Breaks” Landrum, David W. (Feb. ’08): “Snowcream” Larke, Maude (Aug. ’10): “Technocracy” Laue, John (Sum./Aut. ’15): “European Highkus*” LaVigne, Steve (Wint. ’16): “On these Walls” Lee, Jason (Nov. ’05): “Fire Lines” Lefkowitz, Larry (Aug. ’08): “well into middle age,” “Backsliding” Legat, Robert (May ’06): “Alice” Legget, Charles (Spr./Sum. ’13): “Word-of-Mouth” Lehmann, Gary (May ’07): “Where’s My Stuff?;” (May ’08): “Turner’s Venice,” “Faulkner gives a reading;” (Feb. ’09): “Mickey Mantle Tagged Out at Second;” (May ’09): “How to Levitate a Frog,” “Just so amazed were we,” “Discovering Rightness,” “Loving Missives From the King Dome,” “A Conductor admonishes discordant notes;” “Amy Lowell’s Imagism” (essay); “Sudoku in Words: Puzzling Out the Poetry of Bin Ramke” (review essay); (Aug. ’10): “Slave to Circumstance,” “Garfield on Ice” Levin, Carol (Aug. ’08): “The Omnipresent Heat of August” Levy Tate, Brenda (Aut. ’12): “Exploring the Terrain of Head Lands” (review) Lighthouse, Richard (Aug. ’08): “when irrelevant seems germane;” (Feb. ’10): “at the edge of self,” “southern comfort” Lisowski, Joseph (Feb. ’08): “What are Friends for?,” “Fast Food,” “Excavatin’ for a Mine” from the cycle, Stashu Kapinski Dreams of Glory Little, Shelley (Nov. ’07): “Home and Native Land,” “Sea Mourning;” (Feb. ’08): “Remains of a Life” Lockie, Ellaraine (Feb. ’06): “Suckers” (review); (May ’06): “Sunday Ceremony,” “Family Reunion,” “Absolution From Lyn Lifshin;” (Nov. ’06): “Mother May I in Santa Cruz, California,” “Censured at Starbucks,” “Scavenger,” “To Erato;” (Feb. ’07): “The Life Cycle of Paradise Lost: Creation, Hallucination, Damnation;” (May ’07): “A Week With Hugh Fox” (essay); (Aug. ’07): “Icon Cowboy,” “Godot Goes to Montana,” “From Women All Over the World;” (Feb. ’08): “Asks for Oysters,” “Goose Bumps;” (May ’08): “Hell Hole,” “Irony in Italy;” (Feb. ’09): “A Writer’s Secret Weapon (essay); (May ’10): “Twelve Steps from the Art Studio” (essay); (Aug. ’10): “The Long Flight of Fancy;” (Wint. ’12): “Torna a Sorriento,” “Evening in Paris;” (Wint/Spr. ’14): “Liberated Woman” Longworth, Fred (May ’09): “Breaking the Rules” Losse, Helen (Nov. ’05): “Union Pacific #5117,” “Wintertime Prayer;” (May ’06): “Borrowed Memories: A Eulogy;” “Suggestions for Poets” (essay); (Nov. ’06): “Where the Reverie Is Apt To Lead;” (May ’08): “Needed In Train, Song, and Light;” (Aug. ’09): “Revisiting the Child in The Fractured World by Scott Owens” (review) Loving, Denton (Apr. ’11): “When Next I Dream” Lowenstein, Terry (Nov. ’05): “Craving Pumpkins,” “Words Made to be Eaten;” (Feb. ’06): “Unearthing Treasures in My Backyard” (review); (May ’06): “remembering,” “Mannequin Envy,” “parity speaks;” “Two

104

chapbook reviews — apples for adam and In Praise of Old Photographs” (reviews) (Aug. ’06): “Twice Removed by William Greenway” (review), “Voices in My Head;” (Nov. ’06): “Three Chapbook Reviews” (review) Luntz, David (Aug. ’06): “Sunday Morning Thoughts,” “Dividing Lines,” “The Achaean Returns;” (Nov. ’06): “Last Writes;” (Feb. ’07): “Dream Meditation;” (Aug. ’07): “Mon Triste Oncle;” (Nov. ’08): “I Liked Driving;” (May ’09): “Thoughts on St. Anselm,” “Train Shopping;” (Spr./Sum. ’12): “The Goodbye Garden” Macdonald, Iain (Wint. ’12): “Compensation” MacLean, J. R. (Nov. ’07): “C-eh-N-eh-D-eh” (collaboration) MacLean, J. S. (Apr. ’11): “Report from the Mara,” “Under a Rock” MacLean, Luke (Aug. ’08): “Linoleum” Maclean, Robin (May ’06): “The Attire of Superficiality” MacMillan, Cyndi (Spr. ’16): “Round Midnight,” “Roadkill” Mahoney, Donal (Feb. ’09): “Death a Bear” Majors, Michelle L. (Nov. ’05): “Loss,” “Friday Fairy Tales” Makuz, Carin (Feb. ’06): “Literary Nude” (essay) Malby, Scott (Nov. ’05): “Pasternak's imaginary funeral” Mallino, Rachel (Nov. ’05): “The Star that Leads Him Home” Manning, Dawn (Apr. ’11): “Oranges in Winter” Marbach, Donna M. (Feb. ’08): “Forbidden Fruit,” “Insatiable,” “The Hunger,” “How the Family Coped until the Canaries Ripened,” “1958 Time Machine;” “Poetry and the Art of Eating Life” (essay) Marcél, F. D. (aka Frank) (Aug. ’06): “Escapism and Something More;” (May ‘07): “Thoughts from the Corner of the Old Apartment,” “Charles;” (Feb. ’08): “New Year's with a Family Man” Marks, Michael M. (Aug. ’10): “Eggshell Beetles” Martin, Clare L. (Apr. ’11): “Note to Self” Martin, D. S. (Sum./Aut. ’15): “On Mission in Belize” Martin, Eric (Feb. ’08): “The King of Thulé – A Ballad —Translated from Goethe” Matthews, Byron (Apr. ’11): “Like Falling off a Rancorous Legume” McDonough, Kaye (May ’06): “Pictures from Bohemia” (essay) McGee, Matt (Wint./Spr. ’15): “The Fishtank Life” McGuire, Catherine (Nov. ’10): “Cherry Bride,” “Spring Unfurled;” (Sum./Aut. ’15): “Eating at the Poorhouse,” “Sweet Home Museum” McKernan, John (Aut. ’11): “Photographs in the Painting” McLean, David (May ’08): “non-conscious trees,” “the corpse that watches,” “the ritual” McPherson, Karen (Feb. ’09): “Three Photos — Four Generations,” “Echo Chamber” McRae, Bruce (Spr. ’16): “Smudge” Meador, Steve (Nov.’08): “Jungians” Merrifield, Karla Linn (Feb. ’07): “I Dream of Darwin;” “Anointing the Pretty (Blue) Feet: A Vagabond Poet in the Galapagos” (essay); (Nov. ’07): “Beware of Bait-Stealing Raven;” (guest editorial); “Three Pieces of Cod (I, II & III),” “Defining Bedrock,” “Butedale Rite,” “Après Butedale,” “Butterclam Communion,” “Backcountry Road;” (May ’08): “Nativity,” “Switched Over to Cosmic Energy,” “Apalachicola (FL): Camper’s Revenge Ends in Suicide;” (Aug. ’08): “Seeking the ‘Hollow of Night’” (review); (Nov. ’08): “Of Coffee Pots and the Ineffable” (review); (Feb. ’09): “Ariadne’s Departure;” “(T)he moment that hides in the breath” (review); (May ’09): “Surviving ‘the pull of cheap evenings’” (review); (Aug ’09): “Farewell with Lines from the Chinese Masters,” “River of Memory;” “‛within this cage’” (review); (Nov. ’09) “ ;” “Leaving Fingerprints,” “Rebel to a Tee;” “‛lost souls in the gutter’” (review); (Feb. ’10): “‛This isn’t about prayer as such’”(review); (May ’10): “Dixie Crucifix,” “My Body is a Nest;” “When ‘the moon bites its lip’”(review); (Aug. ’10): “The Offering,” “Wash Day,” “Raven Woman’s Artifact, 1862;” “to save my life by saving yours,” (review); (Nov. ’10): “‛Poetry by real poets’”(review); (Apr. ’11): “1513: Ponce de Leon and the Fountain of Death,” “Ruinás di Velho Airão;” “a surprising creation” (review); (Aut. ’11): “Elegiac Meditation (on the part of me that’s gone);” “a thousand dazzling suns” (review); (Wint. ’12): “back to dirt roads, hot trailers / dangerous alcoholic stepfathers” (review); (Spr./Sum. ’12): “a gothic hourglass / of sand” (review); (Aut. ’12): “Becoming the Web’s Most-Visited Lit Site,” “Tweets by the Sweethearts of Alachua Preserve;” “Stop the Cloud; I Want to Get Off, I Think” (review); (Wint./Spr. ’13): “Their Divorce Began at the Kitchen Table over Soup Beans and Cornbread,” “drab dabs of ash / on their lips // & the future” (review); (Spr./Sum. ’13): “Sex and the Semicolon,” “‘The punch[line] of treachery’” (review); (Aut. ’13): “‘The lost jewelry showed up’” (review); (Wint/Spr. ’14): “Algonquin Gestalt,” “postcard(s) / with no return address” (review); (Sum. ’14): “Pacific Sisters,” “stuck on the same stupid cloud channel

105

all day long” (review); (Wint./Spr. ’15): “Wealth of Souvenirs,” “a solitary, endless / infinitive” (review); (Sum./Aut. ’15): “Room with Views,” “Walking on Eigg,” “gasp of fearful pleasure” (review); (Spr. ’16): “Turning Heatless,” “untitled tanka,” “‘It really is enough to have fun.’” (review); (Wint. ’16): “The Tao of Poetry Reading Will Return …” (review/interview) Messenger, Nicholas (Feb. ’08): “Tungle,” “Piano Malady;” (May ’08): “The Age of Rivers;” (Feb. ’09): “The Solar-Powered Plane Falls;” (Aug. ’09): “Parliament of Birds,” “On Such a Night . . . ,” “Poem for Pomme d’Epi, a Pig;” (Nov. ’09): “Skull,” “A Ghost;” (Nov. ’10): “What’s Wrong with Strawberries?;” (Wint. ’16): “Lancewood” Meyer, Nancy L. (Wint. ’16): “Querido, Sr. Neruda,” “How Might You Uncover a Nest?,” “Under Here” Michaels, Denise Calvetti (May ’06): “When I Begin to Sew, Cara Nonna, I Write;” (Feb. ’07): “Daughter, English Teacher in South Korea,” “Saturday Morning, Along Redmond Ridge Drive,” “Nine Days Before Dad Dies,” “New Year’s Day, 2006, From the Shores of Lake Washington” Milbury-Steen, John (May ’07): “At Checkout,” “To Marvel,” “Ambush;” (Feb. ’08): “Thanksgiving Dinner;” (May ’08): “His Ironic Invention,” “Easter Saturday;” (Feb. ’09): “Animal Soap;” (May ’09): “Seize Remaining Days,” “Teaching Science in Africa;” (Nov. ’09): “Being Licked into Shape,” “Disciplined;” (Feb. ’10): “Gloves,” “Inside and Outside” Miller, John D. (Feb. ’08): “Bringing Home the Breadwinner” Miller, John N. (Sum. ’14): “New Year” Mitchell, Mark J. (Spr./Sum. ’12): “Sonnet of the Big Bang,” “Vespers” Mo, Suchoon (Feb. ’06): “dear Cupid,” “Enormous Kiss;” (Nov. ’06): “Come To Aspen” Moolla, Afzal (Aut. ’12): “For Pete Seeger, Huddie ‘Leadbelly’ Ledbetter & Woody Guthrie” Moore, George (Nov. ’09): “The Crow in Some Mythologies,” “The Pig Farmers,” “The Center of the Earth,” “An Old Map of the Body;” “The Poet’s Image on a Ride” (essay); (Sum./Aut. ’15): “Benares,” “The Eleven Gates of Rhodes” Morris, Ellen Birkett (Aug. ’07): “Adagio in Wood;” (Feb. ’08): “Pom,” “Authenticity” Morris, Wilda (Wint/Spr. ’14): “From St. Pancras Old Church, London,” “To My Grandson, from Eastern Colorado;” (Sum./Aut. ’15): “With Tom in Chester: A Four-Footed Sonnet,” “Timbuktu” Mortenson, Erik K. (Nov. ’08): “Sleeping with the Seer;” (Feb. ’09): “Illumination in the Shipwrecked Night: C. E. Chaffin’s Unexpected Light: Selected Poems and Love Poems 1998-2008” (review); (May ’09): “Cleaning Out the Attics of the Mind: Barbara Hamby’s All-Night Lingo Tango” (review); (Aug. ’09): “Guess Who’s Coming to Christmas Dinner? Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: A New Verse Translation” (review) Mulrooney, Christopher (Nov. ’05): "the blarney in the castle," "the goldfish bowl" Muir, A. H. (Wint. ’16): “Tae a Fly” Mürer, Esther Greenleaf (Feb. ’10): “To a Table,” “Decluttering,” “A poem, anyhow,” “Indoor sports,” “Anthem du jour,” “Antiphon;” “Donnybrook of the Blot and Sequitur: How I Made Friends with Poetry” (essay); (Aug. ’10): “The Fixer,” “Baking sheet;” (Spr./Sum. ’12): “World-Saving Poem,” “Return of the ZedA;” (Sum. ’14): “Listen;” (Wint. ’16): “The Thread-Fractal,” “Ashbery is of Two Minds about the Opera” N., Andy (Wint./Spr. ’15): “The Way Out” Needle, Burgess Stanley (Aug. ’09): “Somehow Not Safe at All” Neill Bebergal, Amy (Wint./Spr. ’13): “Once the River” Nelson, J. D. (Feb ’06): “never as cold as the life in your eyes,” “recession” Nezafati, Peter (Feb. ’08): “Romantic Reptiles” Nicola, James B. (Sum./Aut. ’15): “The Piazza senza banco;” (Wint. ’16): “Frostbite #4: In the Mist” Niditch, B. Z. (Wint/Spr. ’14): “Never-Sleeping City” Nights, P. J. (Aug. ’06): “Miss Brunswick Diner,” “the real author of the bible sheds light on hollywood;” (Feb. ’09): “for the sweetest lass on the return of her dogs (no thanks to her husband),” “para pablo, paradelle;” (May ’09): “Senbazuru,” “towards a unified theory” Nye, Rollo (Wint. ’16): “John Berryman’s View off the Washington Avenue Bridge” O’Connell, Thomas (Nov. ’05): "Chasing Imaginary Pigeons" O’Keefe, Sherry (Nov. ’10): “From Her Mother's August, Through October Mud: A Review of Karen J. Weyant's Stealing Dust” (review) O’Neal, David L. (Spr./Sum. ’12): “The Rhubarb Tree,” “Gollywobbler, Futtock, Fother and Fandangle” Oberlin, Kevin (Wint./Spr. ’15): “In the Dream Where I Stand up for Myself,” “Before Opening the Envelope, Consider”

106

Olaopa Mwenda, Ocalive (Aug. ’06): “His and Hers Flowers” (essay); (Nov. ’06): “A Fix For the Spaces Between” (review); (Aug. ’07) “Wide Bones: Bearing the Weight in Patrick Carrington’s Rise, Fall and Acceptance” (review); (Aug. ’08): “Absence of Light: Quirks of Dark: A review of Mathias B. Freese’s Down to a Sunless Sea” (review) Oliver, Maurice (May ’07): “Orchids for Her Hothouse;” (Spr./Sum. ’12): “The History of Inventions (Condensed Version)” Opperman, Michael (Feb. ’09): “World's Best List” Otto, Lynn (Wint./Spr. ’13): “The Life Insurance Company Is Calling Your Friends;” (Sum. ’14): “In China I Am Blameless,” “Penjing;” (Wint. ’16): “Canyon Welding” Overmire, Laurence (Aug. ’08): “Saturday Night,” “Brooklyn Nights” Owens, Bryan (Wint. ’12): “The 3-Minute Vintage: A Tasting;” “A Venn-Diagram of the Senses” (essay); (spr./sum. ’12): “In Light of Monsters,” “Modern Vampire Anti-Ode,” “Reassurance,” “Unearth the LifeAltering Wisdom: The Clinical Death Procedure;” “Hook: A perhaps over-generalized essay that offers no answers, but addresses the essentiality of Peter Pan, writing, and some dry humping” (essay) Owens, Scott (Aug. ’09): “Reunion,” “Burden,” “Coalescence;” (Feb. ’10): “The Merits of Not Multi-Tasking;” (Aug. ’10): “Unnecessary Things,” “How to Get Here from There;” (Apr. ’11): “Patriotic Norman Sings, America;” (Aut. ’11): “The Loneliness of Old Men” Oyeleye, Damilola (May ’07): “Divination” Parker, Pamela Johnson (Wint./Spr. ’13): “First Person Plural, First Person Singular” Pearce, Jared (Spr. ’16): “Blue Jays Mating,” “Sparrows Mating” Pearce, Josh (Nov. ’10): “after rain,” “cathedral bells” Peckman, Rod (Aut. ’11): “Eastern Oregon: Disassembling the Wreckage,” Hidden in the Red-Rock Debris: Colorado Plateau” Pelley, Sherry (Apr. ’11): “Holy Shit,” “Orion” Philibert, Leslie (Sum. ’14): “Church,” “Sacrifice;” (Wint./Spr. ’15): “A Murdered Girl Lies Next to a Motorway,” “Priest;” (Sum./Aut. ’15): “Considering the Poet’s Universal Obligations” (essay), “Paradise,” “Saint-Malo, France,” “The Italian Way to Say Goodbye” Piekarski, Thomas (Wint./Spr. ’13): “Stinson Beach” Plath, Rob (Nov. ’08): “the murky surface;” (Aug. ’10): “daydreaming of transfusions” Pobo, Kenneth (Nov. ’05): “Night Garden,” “Red Planet Green,” “Hades Apologizing to Persephone,” “I Wonder If,” “All This;” “Doing It” (essay); “Twining the Wild Braid, A Review” (review); (May ’06): “Knoxville Drag Show,” “I’m a Drag;” (Feb. ’09): “Box-Making Boy,” “Praise for Some Things that Pass Away;” (Nov. ’10): “Winter Fig,” “Tuesday, January 12, 2010;” “Barren Winter” (essay) Powderly, Colleen (Wint./Spr. ’13): “Dry Spell,” “After a Meeting;” (Spr./Sum. ’13): “The Color of Light;” (Aut. ’13): “Jewels Fashioned with Craft” (review); (Wint/Spr. ’14): “Walking the Caloosahatchee,” “Friday the Thirteenth, Chicago;” (Spr. ’16): “Surviving the Cold” Price, L. M. (Nov ’10): “Life Support” Quinlan, Philip (Nov. ’10): “At One,” “Eclipse in October” Rather, Jr., M. (Nov. ’09): “She Explains Herself to the Trees” rawlinson, kerry (Wint. ’16): “Echo” Reilly, Christine (Wint. ’12): “Names,” “After My Friend Is Killed in a Motorcycle Accident: I Tell Everybody I Want a Harley” Reini-Grandell, Lynette (Aut. ’13): “The Naturalist” Reninger, Tom (May ’08): “inside her,” “the hothouse love,” “no transfusions possible” Renstrom, Vincent (May ’09): “A Cat’s Life;” (Aug. 09): “If You Bring Passion, Faults Will Be Overlooked,” “A Doggone Portrait;” (May ’10): “Humming Afternoon Delight;” (Apr. ’11): “Europe Meets America (not its real name);” (Wint. ’12): “Swallowed Memory;” (Spr./Sum. ’13): “Plain Talkin’ Tanka” Rice, Oliver (Aug. ’09): “Look for It in Brahms, She Says,” “Elizabeth’s Eyes” Richards, Derek (Nov. ’09): “feathers for jane” Richardson, Erik (Nov. ’08): “The Coffee Shop Saint,” “Chessmen at the Close of Day,” “Woods Words Worlds,” “Postmodern Change of Seasons;” “Reflections on Woods Words Worlds” (essay); (Feb. ’09): “The Magazine Me;” (Aug. ’09): “Knights and Ladies of the Not-So-Round Table: A Narrated Play without Dialogue;” (Feb. ’10): “The Abandoned Asylum,” “Permuted Merton;” (Aug. ’10): “Custom Poem;” “Taoism, Craftsmanship, and Writing” (essay); (Aut. ’11): “Road Trip and Retreat: Two Ideas of Escape in the Poetic Works of B. J. Best” (review); (Spr./Sum. ’12): “electronic angels” “Psychology and the Unique Role of Science

107

Fiction Poetry” (essay); (Wint./Spr. ’13): “Drowning, Surviving, and the Therapy of Writing” (essay); (Spr./Sum. ’13): “Life as Narrative— Bring Your Own Protagonist into Sharper Focus” (essay); (Wint/Spr. ’14): “Postcards as Snapshots of Hyperreality” (essay) Riekki, Ron (Sum. ’14): “Orlando Medical School” Ries, Charles P. (Nov. ’05): “Marlboro Man on Michigan Avenue;” “Le Mot Juste” (review); (Feb. ’06): “The Silence Between Worlds” (review), “Chasing Saturday Night” (review), “New American Underground Poetry Vol. 1: The Barbarians of San Francisco — Poets from Hell” (review) Riley, Drew (May ’10): “Snowy Robes Give Way to His Right Hand;” (Apr. ’11): “Tell Me” Riley, John (Aug. ’09): “To A Friend Who Broke His Neck at Davis Water Gage, Summer, 1967” Rivera, Nanette Rayman (Aug. ’06): “High Tide” Roberts, Phillip M. (Aug. ’08): “Goodman's Soliloquy” Robinson, Margaret A. (Nov. ’05): “There's a Lot Going on in the Garden,” “July 4, 1947,” “Young and Old,” “A Cat's Last Cradle;” “Winter as Mountain Climber" (essay); (Feb. ’06): “Jubilation,” “2 36 75,” “Two Cards in a White Carton with Red Paper Hearts,” “Subaru, Corvette, ATM,” “Foil Hearts;” (Nov. ’06): “Two Beds with Dogs ,” “Green Ambush;” (Feb. ’09): “For a Time,” “Thanks for Your Thanks” Robison, Cassandra (Feb. ’07): “Uncaged of Pain: A Review of Lynn Strongin’s chapbook Dovey & Me” (review); (May ’09): “Hybrid” Rose, Brad (Apr. ’11): “Departure,” “In the Jardin du Luxembourg, amid the Little Pink Roses of Spring, Monsieur Zero Disappears,” “Waiting Room View” Rounds, Nathaniel S. (Aug. ’07): “Rope House*,” “Opera Chronique (Vehicle for Street Talk, Old Saw and General Despondency);” (Feb. ’10): “Fluke,” “AM Radio in A Minor;” (Spr./Sum. ’13): “Courtly Love” Roy, Sankar (Nov. ’06): “Life's Lesson,” “Endurance,” “The Judgment Day” Ruel, Steven (May ’08): “as-troll-ogy” Ruhlmann, Walter (Spr./Sum. ’12): “Space Unconsciousness I,” “What Would G Be for Then?”

Russ, Jana (Apr. ’11): “How a Woman Can Be Frozen” Safir, Natalie (Aug. ’08): “Mary’s Dream” Sagan, Miriam (Aug. ’06): “Manifest” Saitoh, Alan Botsford (Feb. ’09): “A Mamaist Compass” Salzano, April (Wint./Spr. ’13): “Today I Am Thankful;” (Wint/Spr. ’14): “Channeling” Sayeed, Iftekhar (Wint./Spr. ’15): “Of Fire and Fog” Schelb, Edward (Aut. ’13): “The Gospel of Columbkille” Schiffman, Richard (Nov. ’09): “The Dance of Leaving;” (Feb. ’10): “A Lesson in Etymology,” “Loony Tunes,” “Bloody Buddy;” (May ’10): “Recycling,” “Been There, Done That,” “Corn Plant,” “Aftermath;” “Learning from the Starfish: The Poetry of Spiritual Renewal” (essay) Schout, Dawn (Nov. ’10): “Silent Conversation” Schubmehl, Wanda (May ’07): “Poem for Mark Doty,” “Early Morning Poet,” “Below the Summit,” “No One Was Ever Gentle With This Book,” “Seasons;” “Don't Give Me Apples: A Response to Mark Doty's Source,” “Black Boat Floating: A Response to Mary Oliver’s The Oak Tree at the Entrance to Blackwater Pond” (reviews); (Aug. ’07): “Four Lane Road Edward Hopper, 1956;” (Nov. ’07): “Mirage of the Heart;” (Feb. ’09): “Egg” Schwartz, G. David (May ’08): “October, 1993” Scott, Marissa A. (Feb. ’06): “Dawn Pathways” seidensticker, l. a. (May ’09): “Submission Follows;” (Aug. ’09): “Looking out from High Places,” “Lighted Torches that Flatter the Ladies,” “I Go into Business,” “Boomerang;” (Feb. ’10): “Starlings,” “Lately Winter: Bodega Bay” Sell, Robert (Nov. ’10): “The Separation of Us;” (Wint./Spr. ’13): “Missing” Seraphimidou, Anna (Nov. ’05): “A Cat’s Last Cradle” Settingsgaard, Adam (Aug. ’09): “Photospheric Fortunes” Shapiro, Lynne (Feb. ’10): “Sharpen Your Eyes” Shepherd, Salli (Apr. ’11): “Witches,” “The Art of Unknowing” Siegel, Scot (Nov. ’09): “When You Bring My Meds;” (Apr. ’11): “Minor Poet in Space” Sirowitz, Hal (Wint/Spr. ’14): “You Say Goodbye” Slayden, Tommie (Wint./Spr. ’13): “riding with him,” “I Am Seventeen, My Parents Are on Vacation, Things Go Horribly Wrong with My Grandmother” Sloboda, Noel (Apr. ’11): “Couples Art Therapy;” (Spr./Sum. ’12): “Baba Yaga’s Yard Sale;” (Wint/Spr. ’14): “Spargelzeit in Munich”

108

Smith, David-Glen (Aut. ’11): “Fragments: East St. Louis 1996” Smith, Ian C. (Aut. ’12): “Endings Can Be Tricky;” (Sum./Aut. ’15): “Towards Alaska” Smith, M. R. (Wint./Spr. ’15): “Insecticide” Smith, Shadwell (Sum./Aut. ’15): “Drunk on the Moon” Snell, Cheryl (Nov. ’05): “Threshold,” “How to Survive a Storm,” “Blue-Eyed Pony;” (Aut. ’11): “Sister Age” Soderling, Janice D. (May ’08): “Memento Mori,” “Pantoum for the Final Stretch;” (Feb. ’09): “Runner-Up in the Waiting Room;” (Aug. ’09): “Going for a Ride;” (Feb. ’10): “Continental Breakfast,” “At the Used Car Cemetery (or Was It in the Women’s Ward?);” (Nov. ’10): “Midnight,” “Disjointed Soliloquy on a Gray Day,” “Not Only in Autumn;” “A Voyage of Discovery” (essay); (Wint./Spr. ’13): “The Gay Divorcée Contemplates December;” (Spr./Sum. ’13): “The Ballad of Cross and Peale” Solonche, J. R. (Aug. ’07): “Memorial Service for Curt,” “Ghazal-Sonnet on Glass;” (May ’08): “Spring” Sorestad, Glen (Wint./Spr. ’15): “How the Poem Happens” Spears, James Martin (Aut. ’11): “Red-haired Salvation” Spinello, Serena (Nov. ’07): “A Blubbering Blazon” Sprague, David (Aug. ’10): “New York Like New York;” (Apr. ’11): “(Love, Love, Said the Fucking Poem)” Stanley, Farren (May. ’09): “Animus” Starbuck, Scott T. (Sum./Aut. ’15): “The Radical Surgery of Now” Steinfeld, J. J. (Spr./Sum. ’13): “If Given the Choice Between Meeting Franz Kafka or Marilyn Monroe” Stern, Marvin (Aug. ’09): “Man or Quail?” (essay) Stevens, Jeanine (Nov. ’10): “Bungalow;” (Aut. ’11): “Prehistory of Bird and Eye,” “In My Dream, a Little Boat;” (Sum./Aut. ’15): “Mythology” Stevens, Paul Christian (May ’07): “Rimbaud’s Evening Prayer;” (May ’09): “How,” “Declensions” Stewart, Eamonn (Nov. ’05): “Insurgent Tourist,” “My First Brumaire in Belfast;” (Feb ’06): Bluebagopolis,” “The Cows Muddied My Personal Helicon,” “Feasts of Hunger;” (Aug. ’06): “To the Poet on the Subject of Flowers;” (Nov. ‘06): “Divis On Fire;” (Wint./Spr. ’13): “The Kindness of Women” (photo-essay), “Rhapsody on a Chain-Link Fence;” (Wint/Spr. ’14): “Adverse Memory” Stolis, Alex (May ’06): “The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup,” “Nowhere Again;” (May ’08): “i’ve thrown away everything i’ve ever written” Stromberg, Luke (Aut. ’13): “Talking to God,” “Teenager in Love,” “Saturday Morning,” “Chester Heights,” “On Poetic Gems” (essay) Strongin, Lynn (May ’06): “Colt Revolver Factory: American Prostheses I, American Prostheses II, Colt Revolver Factory;” (Feb. ’07): “Where I’d Be This Time Next Year;” (Nov.’07): “Drypoint Canadian Winter,” “Summer has been a century long;” “Holding onto My Childhood” (essay); (Feb. ’08): “Brutalia, Gloria,” “Darkover;” (Aug. ’08) “We See the Face,” “She Has Not Come Undone;” “Excerpts of a Dreamlike Memoir in Shafts of Light — Festina Lente” (essay); (Aug. ’09): “We Meet Pippi in the Playing Field at Dusk;” (Sum. ’14): “Our fathers taught us cold grace” Summers, S. Thomas (Aug. ’06): “A Midsummer Day’s Dream,” “Anchor’s Bend;” (Feb. ’08): “Sedition;” (Nov. ’10): “Private Levi McCormick Writes His Wife: Christmas 1864” Szabo, John (Sum./Aut. ’15): “Particles of Me” Taylor, Ann (Nov. ’10): “Today at Walden;” (Aut. ’12): “Sex Is Only Part of Casanova’s Story” Taylor, Jeffrey (Aug. ’07): “On Birds and Men” Taylor, Rob (Nov. ’07): “a Vancouverite throws Toronto a bone,” “flying to Vancouver” Terpstra, John (Nov. ’07): “Morning at Fort Wellington” Terzi, Judith (Spr./Sum. ’13): “Aphasia,” “Like What’s Not to Like?,” “Water Towers at a Poetry Workshop;” (Wint/Spr. ’14): “Letter from Iraq;” (Sum. ’14): “The Road to Buckhorn;” (Spr. ’16): “Hegemony” Thompson, Heath (Feb. ’06): “Fist” Thunell, Carrieann (Feb. ’06): “Great Grandma’s Rituals,” “Uncle Rodger’s Pennywhistle Medicine;” (May ’06): “The Barista’s Untrainable Bloodhound;” (Feb. ’07): “The glacial chill of winter shall descend;” (May ’07): “Tribute to Klyd Watkins,” “Do Not Go Gentle To That Dental Drill” Timpane, Philip (Nov. ’10): “white flag,” “A Touch of Frost” Toupin, James (Aug. ’08): “Investigation: Dream;” (Wint/Spr. ’14): “Not a Postcard from Tokyo;” (Spr. ’16): “Fear of Heights,” “Muse 1 & 2” Trame, Davide (May ’06): “Earth’s Womb;” (May ’09): “Viburnum,” “Curious Childhood;” (Wint./Spr. ’13): “Travenanzes” Turmel, Rebekah (Apr. ’11): “Dear Sylvia Plath”

109

Van Pelt Dus, Lisken (Wint/Spr. ’14): “Four Postcards” VanBuren, Jennifer (May ’06): “Intramural Hostess” Vargo, Sam (Feb. ’08): “Bad Love Is Eaten Like Hot Dogs,” “Mass” Vishwanathan, Ajay (Aug. ’09): “Mom Doesn't Like Dad's Dad;” (Nov. ’09): “Wedding Bells for Little Feet” Voytac, Sharon (Spr./Sum. ’12): “Sirena” Walker, B. Scott (Wint./Spr. ’15): “Space Inseparable” Walther, Margaret (Nov. ’10): “We Once Dwelled,” “Ode to My Pubic Hair;” (Apr. ’11): “Stone Family Saga” Watkins, Klyd (Feb ’06): “Ganier Ridge Trail — 4/23/92,” “Lavetta Swift Bench — 2/3/99;” (May ’06): “Jack, Chapter Six: Jack Remembered Sweet Talkin’ Man;” (Aug. ’06): “Poncho” Wattles, Lafayette (May ’08): “I Chipped My Faith on the Ceiling at Sistine Chapel” Watts, J. S. (Wint. ’12): “Wilted Flowers” Weaver, Elizabeth (Apr. ’11): “Organic Redefined” Welch, Luke (May ’06): “Father's Hands,” “The Way It Was” Wellingham-Jones, Patricia (May ’06): “Cowpoke with a Sore Butt;” (Aug. ’06): “Limbo,” “Change;” (Nov. ’06): “Creek Walk,” “Basket,” “Dream Foods,” “A Stranger Visits;” “The Art of the Off-Beat Sells” (essay); (Aug. 07): “Favorite Picture;” (Feb. ’08): “Doorway” Welsh, James (Apr. ’11): “Penelope’s Lament” Whitmore, Ken (May ’07): “Picasso at the Bateau Lavoir;” (Aug. ’07): “A Fortunate Man,” “Father and Son;” (Feb. ’08): “Strauss Waltz;” (May ’08): “A Brief History of Western Philosophy;” (Feb. ’09): “Rainbows” Whitehead, J. T. (Wint. ’16): “Water,” “Out East” Wilcox, Daniel E. (May ’07): “Lapping Ideas,” “I Love You Flannery O'Connor;” (Nov. ’07): “A Canadian Fable of the North,” “My Canadian Memories,” “From Below the Line;” (May ’08): “The Crucified Isle;” (Nov. ’08): “The Nature of Fishhooks;” (Feb. ’10): “Sayings So Unkind;” (May ’10): “The Teeth of It” Wilcox, Earl J. (May ’06): “Kinsey's First Interview,” “Poetry in Motion;” (Aug. ’06): “Teaching an Old Bird New Tricks;” “Traveling with my Muse” (essay); (Nov. ’06): “A Human Stain;” (Feb. ’07): “Winter Solstice: Variations and Dreams;” (Aug. ’07): “Mama’s Boy Shops for Hazel,” “Caveman Visits Doctor,” “Hitchhiking in a Minor Key,” “Garden Gerontology;” “‘The Work is Play For Mortal Stakes:’* Working, Playing, and Writing” (essay); (Feb. ’08): “An Extreme-Makeover Breakfast;” (Aug. ’08): “A Widow’s Funky Life;” (Nov. ’08): “Some quoted clichés about bicycle;” (Nov. ’09): “Dear Wade;” (Wint/Spr. ’14): “Major League Birding” Williams, Amelia L. (Spr./Sum. ’12): “Well-Defensed” Williams, Brandon (Aug. ’10): “Community” Williams, Mukesh (Nov. ’07): “Canada and India” Willitts, Jr., Martin (Aug. ’08): “Lincoln Sees Ghosts,” “Honor and Dishonor;” (Nov. ’08): “Three Ages of the Woman and the Death;” (Feb. ’09): “Sudden Chill;” (Aug. ’09): “Roses and Tulips,” “Cure,” “The Maiden Locked inside a Glass Hill;” (Nov.’09): “Because I Was a Male Working with Pre-School Children in the ’70s;” (Aut. ’11): “For My Wife Who Died on a Late August Day Much Like Today;” (Spr./Sum. ’13): “What Is the Last Thought of the Person Dying?;” (Aut. ’13): “Misleading Spirits;” (Wint./Spr. ’15): “Chrysanthemums in July;” (Spr. ’16): “Geese in Patterns,” “Goose Boy” Winter, Bill (May ’07): “Confessions of Kim Addonizio's Love Slave” Wong, Nicholas Y. B. (Aug. ’10): “Qipao, Homage to Wong Kar-wai’s The Hand” Wood, Phil (Aut. ’13): “Digs,” “Tintagel Castle;” (Spr. ’16): “Playing at Being Dylan,” “Laugharne;” (Wint. ’16): “Living” Wood, Robert E. (Apr. ’11): “WWBCD: What Would Billy Collins Do in Chicago?;” (Spr./Sum. ’12): “Knowing (1958),” “Horoscope for Sam Spade” Woods, Sylvia (Apr. ’11): “Stud Finder” Wylie, Matthew (Nov. ’07): “Pueblo Polyandrous” Yarrow, Bill (May ’09): “Sermon of Lilacs” Yazinski, Ron (Feb. ’10): “La Cuanna,” “The Guild Studio;” (Aug. ’10): “Rock Garden,” “Artifice;” (Nov. ’10): “Three-Chord Progression”; (Aut. ’11): “A Drive Around;” (Spr./Sum. ’12): “Garden Gnomes,” “The Bear;” (Aut. ’12): “Admission for Disney World,” “Shenandoah;” (Aut. ’13): “Neutrality;” (Spr. ’16): “untitled haiku,” “Ambiance” Young, Barbara (Spr./Sum. ’12): “No Longer the Live-In at Whispering Pines” Young, Brigit Kelly (Aut. ’13): “Along the Moroccan Road” Yuan, Changming (Nov. ’09): “Pumpkins,” “Snow White” Zeitlin, Samantha (Spr./Sum. ’13): “LMGTFY,” “Disassembling,” “Remind”

110

Student Contributors, Nov. ’09: Dull, David, “I’m not the image” Erkan, Ekin, “Locating Individualism” Marchl, William H., “Off the Shepherd” Monasterios, Agatha, “Uno” Montgomery, Jordan, “I’m Jordan” Swift, Makhala, “Tripping off the Tightrope” Winston, Samantha, “A Noticed Kind of Invisible”

“Confetti Party” by E. A. Hanninen, 2017

111

“Bon Voyage, Mes Amis” by E. A. Hanninen, 2017

112