“A poem should have only one or two interesting words.”
––Ralph Nazareth
Once a student of mine used the word luminous in a poem, and I said, Well, there’s your luminous poem. You can only use that once in your life, so is this your luminous poem? She frowned.
I was speaking from experience, having written my plethora poem, my hyperspace poem, my somnambulance poem, not even thinking how I had sealed their fates, not to mention my good friends proffered, kinhin, and concentricity, all now permanently on the shelf.
These insights, of course, come from myriad shimmering epiphanies, three words, incidentally, that make an official banned-from-poetry list I saw online.
The tiger trap of cliché, too, enemy of every poet, woven by words like heart and forever and love, claims many victims, especially young poets eager to gush about their halcyon days.
Perhaps it is more about individual words than combinations, for even though soul is rightly banned, no human could complain about a soul train.
Personally, I’m waiting for just the right place for numinous, a word so beautiful in sound and meaning it should be used by every poet, once, but I may have to wait for the day when something mysterious is revealed to me, when sacred or divine just won’t be enough.
Sitara Gnanaguru
Parable of the Curry Tree
Late summer out on the deck, Ammachi is watering Murraya koenigii, commonly known as karuveppilai in her native Tamil. The product of her propagation efforts is sprouting next to the original chedi, and I ask her why she didn’t just replant it in another pot.
She turns to face me and then turns her attention back to the task at hand, muttering something about how pillai shouldn’t be separated from their Amma As if it’s obvious and goes unsaid. She doesn’t have the heart to uproot even this child and transplant it away from their mother.
Meanwhile, human children––whose parents are guilty of falling for the American Dream––are routinely kidnapped and detained at our Southern border. I wonder who raised the people who are behind these policies. Who raised the ones who are voting for them? How can we impress upon them our shared humanity?
Ammachi shuts off the hose. Her work is done. Her plants are well-nourished. A child was not taken from their mother. The sun is shining.
Pegi Deitz Shea
First House, 1990
Our new neighbor told us: “The sun never shone inside this house. As it moved across the day, Bernice closed the blinds so her rugs and hardwood floors would not bleach. Widowed young. No kids, no pets, no guests, no fires in the fireplace. She kept to herself.”
In those first weeks, we mulled over traces of her existence: a freezer still filled with TV dinners— a pristine white enamel oven built by General Motors; blasts of orange-yellow flowers on the bedroom wallpaper; a 1919 Underwood typewriter; an ancient globe with countries called Rhodesia, Ceylon, Persia; outside, a circular clothesline listing alongside a dead dogwood tree.
Bernice, are you mad we broke in the virgin fireplace? Did the peel of two layers of wallpaper rend you? Did our bright paint blind you? Did each scratch of our dog’s nails on hardwood scar your House Beautiful? Did each scrape of the door we opened to guests shudder you? Did the hole in the living room for cable TV drill through your bones?
If they did, I’m sorry. But babies spit up, pickle jars shatter, cocktails splatter, cleats leave clods, boots puddle, and a dog in his last days muddies floors with excrement.
It took six months before Bernice forgave us in the language of bulbs and perennials: courageous crocuses peeped, headstrong hyacinths waved, hostas hailed us, and pale yellow tulips sang, “Welcome to your home.”
Emma Johnson-Rivard
Glory
Resembling a saint’s halo around the shadow of the observer’s head, a glory is an optical phenomenon caused by sunlight interacting with clouds.
There were protesters at my first Pride. I remember leaning against a tree, watching. It was in a park. They were in the bocce court. Someone sectioned them off. I was sixteen. They had signs.
The words are gone. I think You learn to block these things out. But I remember
I wasn’t afraid of them. It felt like a joke, these people walled off in the bocce court with their signs And their Bibles.
There was a priest there. I remember how scared he looked as he pressed his forehead to another man’s in prayer so solemn and steadfast and small.
How ridiculous he seemed to me. I must have laughed. I remember laughing. You, afraid? What have I ever done to you? And I remember that line in front of the bocce court, all those adults, wiser than me, blocking the path. I know, now that they were shielding me. I know, now, they were waiting for it to go wrong.
I remember a woman in the line, some soccer player, her club emblem on her breast
and how she kissed her lover in front of them. All these men with their signs and their Bibles and their words.
And this woman kissing her partner like she was daring them to look at the sun and burn in her glory.
I remember Her lover was taller and cupped her cheek so gently in defiance.
And how I walked away, laughing at these men. And all these things I didn’t know.
The shield I didn’t see.
I went to Pride today. And I think of that woman and her lover kissing in the shield line shining like the sun.
I think of her (glorious)
Bethany Tap
Intercession for a Queer Mom
Who is God?
Your eyebrows form parentheses as you wait for my answer but years spent in thrall to hymns and verses leave me ill-equipped for off-handed sincerity.
Unlike you, my sweet son, I spent my childhood soaked in God.
I was taught that God is conditional love God is too-bright light but I know now that God is an upside-down reflection in a spoon God is the red writing on thin pages and this same God was a tiny blue capsule swallowed over and over until I filled up, ran over heaving retching leaking out all that Jesus all that holy
until I was emptied into a desert of God-sparkling mirage. Left for dead I formed myself with fear and wonder into a survivor of God.
Who do you think God is? I ask. You tell me: God is a story which is all I ever wanted anyway.
Rachel Toalson
We Gather Here Together
It’s hard not to notice the vultures gathering
they’re not inconspicuous at all against the gray sky, slate pavement
they’re opportunistic waiting for the fall and every time I try to ignore them
one calls out, Hey, baby I’ll take you home if you need a ride
I don’t dignify the comment with attention
I’m not out here for them as much as they’d like to believe I am
I am my own private gathering
I’m out here for all the women in me
Laura Browne-Lambert
Unyielding
A foot collides with my chair. At first, I think it’s an accident. Maybe it is––at first. But it happens a second, and then, a third time. The steady thump of house music conceals the rattle of impact. Dinged metal and scuffed plastic, my chair wobbles over cobblestones, stops for overgrown roots and crumbling asphalt. Its presence is an affront to all things unyielding, including this man in the club. His foot divulges as much. Bared teeth and drunken swagger tell me I don’t belong. But this space is mine, too, because disability does not discriminate. Plague cares not that I have already been marked.
A multicolored pennant will not convince the angel to pass over my house. So, I let my wife stare the man down, her eyes daring him to try again. He moves on, disappears into a crowd of moving bodies. Identities protected by the haze artificial fog and strobe lights. Eyes strip me down until I am flayed skin and glinting bone. My wife feels it, too, sinning through proximity. I feel guilt for having brought this on her.
She feels guilt for being hurt by the adjustments my altered body has brought to our lives. We join the crowd,
try to blend in. Still, we feel the stares. I dance––at times seated, at other times leaning on a walking stick. Will you––dear reader––tell me I am too young to use such tools? Will you try to kick them out from under me?
Will you wonder at the sight of me, here, moving to the music? Will you hope I don’t come back? Or will you just let me dance?
Norah Clifford
New Orleans Sugar & Grit
The only snowballs here are paper cones of flavored ice inking fingers with headachesweet syrup that glues lips in papier-mâché
smiles. Orange air is Cajun spice misting water-damaged windows and grating throats that croon the blues. Saccharine flowers
massage the city’s wrists and neck, perfume dampening sidewalks cleansed each morning to be restained each night. Cathedral birds
are sky rats pinching through thrown-up red beans and rice or cinnamoned King Cake. I stand before the pearly gates
of Heaven to taste alligator meat and hobo piss as bayou angels sip viscous daiquiris and magnolia petals sweat alcoholic dew.
Samuel Perez Lopez
Starving for Freedom
I am terrified of waking one day and not knowing what’s to come. My life is crucified: nailed to this anxiety, this fear of instability. As others around have freedom to breathe, while I look around and am forced to merely inhale my dreams. When I look around, I see what my life could become through the neighbor’s window, sitting at the dinner table and yet unable to taste it. Force-fed into a system that does not allow me to eat, yet somehow expects me to serve my own plate.
How am I meant to feast, when America won’t allow me to satisfy my hunger, won’t even invite me to the table? How am I meant to appease my appetite when I am not allowed even a single crumb from the land in which I grew up in? How skewed this dream that America feeds us has become, when the very meat of “freedom” on its liberty bones turns into a waiting nightmare––America has always had enough seats at the table, Yet chooses to place me outside.
Tohm Balekas
the lost boys of denville
for Ryan, Chris, Jeff, Paul, and Nick
These words…these fragments… these thoughts…these poems… signify my existence, highlight where I’ve come from, where I’ve been, and where I was headed. They scream: I was here, I was alive.
For a while, these poems diminished loneliness, reduced that mountain to a pile of rubble, but every winter, despite having a warm place to call home, the pain returned.
I’ve begun wondering, if we permitted ourselves the opportunity to breathe, would we remember some part of us we misplaced? If we allowed ourselves to look back at our pasts, would we find some small part of us we lost to time? If we tore down walls built in times of total despair, would we see the sun and smile?
I remember boys named Tompkins, Flynn, Wasserburger, Neistadt, and Petrillo. Boys who became men who are still boys. Lost boys who became men who are still lost boys. A snow plow driver with a mangled back; a musician with a dying flame; a bar manager with a college degree; an electrician; a repairer of water mains. And me, a social worker, a wounded healer of destroyed lives. I remember the heartbreak half of us suffered that one summer. And that same summer we all talked about suicide. We were 20 years old and we were still boys. Now, a decade and some change later, not much has changed. Personal battles come and go, private wars still waged.
And though the days are scarce where we can all meet under a full moon, they do exist, they have happened. And in the end, even death cannot rip this from our grip.
Tonight, in this dark unkempt room of dust and poor light that overlooks the city I’ve come to love and hate, I think of these lost boys and the decades of friendship; I think of the memories forged in good times, in bad times, in desperate times, in all times…
And tonight, I raise a cold sweaty glass to memory—for providing strength to get out of bed each morning, for providing warmth in the nighttime, and for not yet failing… because someday it will, and because someday we will all be gone.
Cait O’Kane
Raid Poem #2: After
It’s not good, it’s not right…but you’re free… Thom Yorke
The barricades go up. The rain comes down. The tents vanish. Armored cars haul withdrawing bodies to Chester, to Pottsville, to cells downtown. Buses marked SUNRISE DETOX cruise rundown playgrounds for strung-out souls down Hagert Street. The days pass. My clogged mind, unslept, a sewer of dreams, a system of lights blinking on & off like those little streets where we’d buy lids.
The songs from passing cars promise menace, chaos, death, at least a kind of unruly rest. The barricades stay. The rain stops. The days pass. The fires burn. The dusk bleeds into evening & the sun sets, invisibly, into symptoms and sirens, exhausted eyes, these pleasures of Development. The sky, the sky, my neighbor says, having a smoke, looking up, it used to be so blue.
Kevin LeMaster
Trauma Kit
a tube of lipstick a warm blanket worn thick against a heavy Winter gift card for a cup of coffee weak brew little cream a bright scarf rainbowed wrapped around a neck bruised and battered a sedative on the tongue at the end of despair a knife an address a reason you didn’t need but desperately wanted
Cali Turner
Duplex (she knew the local cops by name)
by first grade, she knew the local cops by name. far ahead of her expected reading level, turning pages was her preferred pastime.
plucking weeds and gathering eggs—some of her father’s preferred pastimes, another was painting, picking only inky indigos and blacks that would fade into a flaxen yellow.
indigos and blacks that would fade into a flaxen yellow on her mother’s skin wasn’t abnormal, the plethora of words she burbled out and sentences she strung together by two.
doctors were astounded by the words she burbled out and sentences she strung together. she witnessed him stroke her mother’s face forcefully enough for her mom to glide through air.
she witnessed her mother glide down their hallway and then crash into their wooden floor. she would disappear into books—Percy Jackson was her favorite.
she would disappear into books; she dreamt of life where she was a child of a god. at three, her response was utter silence; she went mute, for months.
she went mute for months, the doctors were astounded. by first grade, she knew the local cops by name.
Timothy Pilgrim
Trinity Remorse
Brief story, New York Times: New Mexicans generations hence, first atomic bomb, the test. Purple flash to green to white. Shroom cloud rises seven miles high, sand melts to glass. Army brass, breath held, still as desert rats in bright sun––then wild dance. They called test site uninhabited, desolate. Unpardonable lie. Thirteen thousand people. Ten pounds of plutonium rained down, left them awash, aglow. They drank milk from cows layered with hot ash. In innocent bliss, picked beans, corn, peas, ate wholesome poison,
didn’t know death downwind emerged, lives went gone from the good earth. My country to this day won’t say sorry for the horror—please forgive disease, pain, early death for you, your children, their kids, too. Only said There’s no way we’ll admit this, ever pay.
smile lines and crow’s feet, sun bleached business signs and bus route maps, wedding dresses and funeral suits, family recipes never written down, prayers you never purposefully memorized, emergency contact phone numbers you recite when the EMT finally arrives, songs you can still play when you come across a grand piano in a hotel lobby, scars on your knees from scaling fences and barbed wire to watch the stars, baby clothes at the thrift store, tax returns and timecards, prescriptions you know you shouldn’t refill, high school yearbooks, every ring on a tree stump, dog doors no longer in use, unfinished novel manuscripts, your first driver’s license, the box full of gifts from your first love that comes with you to every new apartment, a used car with over 200,000 miles, voicemails from dead friends you can’t delete, rooms you can describe with your eyes closed, a stain you can’t get off of your favorite jacket, liquor you can’t get yourself to drink again, nicknames you can never manage to outgrow, the days accumulated, a life you won’t escape, a life worth living.
Zero Ramos Laforga
Kristi Joy Rimbach
I Want to Love as If It Matters,
to take down the thin chipped wall built by my wounds and blood, to look through eyes humming with truth, to know that any love emitted from my heart does make the world a better place. I want to make the world a better place. I want to climb tall trees and pick swollen fruit to give to my lover. I want to smile toward the hot beam of sun and feel the sweat bead on my upper lip, to touch the cold river with my toes and not recoil. I want to love as if I matter, as if it matters. It matters. It doesn't fall down like dust blown off a shelf, it doesn’t blink out like headlights in a tunnel, it doesn't put its head down on folded arms and sob, it doesn’t smile slyly and crack my skull open. Here’s the truth, here's the truth: I want to love as if it matters, holding my heart open with both hands if I have to, walking bravely forward because the knife wounds are at my back. I want to smooth out cool skin and press fingertips into flesh, to notice eyelashes and collarbones. I want to love like I am filling a dry cracking well, quenching every mouth, flooding, silt swimming, enveloping. I want to love with my raw heart, beaten but beating, still glistening red and clutching. I want to love the eyes across from me filling with memory and sorrow not spilling over. I want to love extravagantly, holding none for a rainy day, holding none for undeserving thoughts, holding none to keep in a tight little statue of grief. I want the stars in my breath to tingle cells, to race through veins and lymph vessels, caress tongues and eyelids. I want to live as if it matters that I am here, that it fills some space that would be aching and wanting without me, that it tips the scales toward good, toward survival. Tall and beaming, I want to take up the space here reserved for me and not crouch down at the edge trying to disappear. I want to live as if it matters, that this composite of bones and skin and brain, matter.
Christie Max Williams
The Speed of Light
Across the irksome room, in a lover’s blooming fury, she flashes her fiery eyes at you, and in the instant you intuit that this bright soul-searing burst from deep within her eyes is moving at the speed of light: one hundred eighty-six thousand miles-per-second, the same speed starlight moves at, and you recall that light from distant stars departed long ago, years ago, traveling near six trillion miles each year, and having journeyed over light years, arrives for you to see on Earth––through which you peer into the starry past.
And in this moment’s musing, you realize the star-like flashing from her eyes must have left a brief but measurable time ago, time past––your past––a boorish past perhaps––and yet your eyes and brain synapses are likewise working at the speed of light, are in the instant’s passing time delaying further nonetheless your comprehension of the ire her eyes are firing to convey––or have, in fact, conveyed––are pushing further in the past the whole damned flashing moment!
Which begs the cosmic question whether you should even bother with responding to what, even now, is rapidly receding in the past––your past––her past––every past––but increasingly the distant past––and after all what does it mean to live within the moment? which moment? and even though all this is happening at the speed of light, you have time to note that the delay in your response to the not-quite-yet-forgotten flashing of her eyes is registering on her lovely face as smoldering exasperation––and yet because you newly comprehend
that time may not exist outside the mind, because you grasp that everything––but most especially she––is made of star stuff,
you feel yourself falling like a comet, madly, brilliantly in love with her again, wanting her forever at the speed of light.
Nicole Farmer
What Ego Wants
after Diamond Forde
ego had red wine & dark chocolate for dinner/ because ego is bruised/ needs consoling after so many magazine rejections/ once ego had a tantrum on a stranger’s front lawn in LA and tore up fistfuls of green grass, sobbing, screaming/ ego recovered, but she wants what she wants/ ego decided to quit acting and focus on poetry/ another artform with so many financial perks/ so ego studies & studies & reads & writes/ ego loves the limelight, the acceptance, but also the solitude/ the sound of the pen scratching the paper/ ego crunches salty potato chips while reading Rebecca Solnit/ ego sits by the window writing in her journal/ ego dreams of a day when she can retire from her job & write every day/ ego & ego & ego makes a monotonous days horrible/ makes the days both torture and laughter/ ego howls at the moon even when it is a new moon & invisible/ego remembers to be thankful sometimes/ sometimes ego forgets
When my mother died, everything she owned fit into a shoebox: some photos, a scarf and a hairbrush with strands of her white hair woven in the bristles.
Poverty and the lifestyle of a monk whittled down her earthly possessions to just this, deliberately.
Hairbrush
Maria Mazziotti Gillan
Because of My Childhood
Because of my childhood, I prefer kitchen table stories told by the old Italian uncles and aunts and cousins, told by my mother and father, stories that made my life magical and opened doors I didn’t know were inside me.
Because of my childhood, I prefer simple foods like polenta or farina or plain spaghetti with homemade tomato sauce. I prefer pasta fagoli and spinach sandwiches.
Because of my childhood, I prefer the beauty of connection from sitting under the grape arbor while my father played cards with the other men and my mother spoke in whispers to the women and we sat around and listened and learned the way that stories form a kind of web around us that holds us together through all the years of our living.
Because of my childhood, I prefer playing Monopoly, dominoes, and gin rummy with my brother and sister on winter evenings.
Because of my childhood, I prefer listening to stories on the radio, the voices of actors coming into our tenement kitchen, and bringing in a wider, wide world which we had not seen, and did not know if we would ever see.
Because of my childhood, I prefer a metal espresso pot, coffee and tiny cups with lots of sugar and lemon peel, but most of all, served with laughter and love under the dangling bulb over that tenement kitchen table.
Because of my childhood, it would be years before I understood the gifts I was given, the simplicity, and laughter, and love that surrounded me better than any cashmere shawl or anything else that I could have that was better, better than anything in a fancy restaurant, with fancy food served in demi-glace which I detest, or a lump of polenta that tastes flat and costs $25. When my mother made it, it was because we were too poor to have anything else, but we didn’t realize it.
It was delicious. She could make anything into a gourmet meal without all the stupid trappings that money brings.
Because of my childhood, I know what it’s like to be poor and I don’t want to be poor again, but I do want to take with me all the memories of the things that were beautiful, the back porch, smoking punks, talking with my friends and playing games, the big gardens my mother planted, and the food she made from all the fresh produce she managed to extract from a tiny bit of land.
Because of my childhood, I praise how much I learned about love and the sacrifices it requires, and the joy it brings, that giving away things is more important than getting them, that there’s always room at the table for one more or one more even when you don’t have money, even when every moment is precious there’s always room to open your heart to the world.
Whitnee Coy
It's funny what people will say & do to relate to one another
Her purple-hued legs, as long as my fingers & the tubes that ran throughout her body were as thick as her pine-needle arms.
When you explain to people your baby is in the NICU, they never know what to say. Prattle about a baby they once knew who survived or read about in a Facebook post. They preach phrases like normal, you’d never know, even graduated early, or only had a hole in their heart to make you feel relieved. Jostle, how lucky you are & how thankful you should feel. Your baby will be fine, & these moments will pass when you can’t hold her, feed her, bathe her, touch her petal-thick skin that you once grew.
Curious people ask if her eyesight will be okay & I wonder if oxygen lines will snake through her nose forever. Or pry if she will always be so tiny––can she catch up? All I can think of is that because she was born so young, she hadn’t learned the reflex of suckling & swallowing. No matter how many breastfeeding articles I read, it would never matter as a toothpick-sized orange feeding tube winds through her nose for nearly 45 days.
It’s funny what people will say & do to relate to one another.
When in the dark of night, while everyone rests & IVs streak both of your arms, you cry with no sound, so nurses or your husband don’t hear because you should be thankful you survived. She survived. But your body feels empty & your arms pine to hold her foot-long body next to yours in rough patterned hospital sheets.
Instead, in the quiet beeps of hospital rooms, you grieve the dreams you had for your pregnancy, birth, & the beginning days of her life.
Grief’s like heavy weights tied to your feet as you learn to walk again, shuffle one foot after another to the NICU in the morning light.
Mickie Kennedy
Mom never touched cash. It felt free, easy, slipping between three different cards she kept in a faux-leather purse.
Interest
She never understood the carrying cost of her morning Egg McMuffin.
She always ordered a ribeye at the Sizzler, sliding me her fatty scraps.
She wore a Jackie Collins power suit while she patched my corduroys.
Her bathroom vanity cluttered with makeup palettes, no presents under the tree. Blame Reagan, she said, retouching her lips.
Phone calls screened by caller ID. Lottery tickets clutched like prayer beads.
The floppy orchid hats she wore to church were already out of fashion before the final bill arrived.
Daniel P. Carey Jr.
Hands Like His
a golden shovel after Seamus Heaney’s “Digging”
He’d rise by five, brew coffee between lacing worn boots and kissing my forehead, his calloused ring finger clinking today’s thermos tune and firing the Ford pickup. My father went to work under the thumb of men who ground his bones back into the concrete dust his beard carried home, his labored squat a cacophony of pops inked like a pen in my mind or on this page where my father rests. The cold screech of steel rivets and rebar. No, I’ll never hold a spade with hands like his. I dig deeper still, shovel filled with words, his hard life silent, so I will speak it.
Barbara Krasner
My Father’s ShopRite as a Family Portrait, 1968
My grandfather shleps into his standing position behind his fossilized cash register as my father, the eldest of four, adjusts the aperture, focuses the camera lens on my mother, rolling two carts through produce, me thumbing through the latest Archie, my middle sister rifling through MAD magazine at the newsstand, my twin sister pushing our father’s nickels into the red-and-white Coke machine to get a Fanta, my oldest sister selecting canned goods for her college pantry, my uncles stuffing daily receipts into deposit pouches. Hold steady! This is for posterity! My long-dead grandmother shows up in the 8x10 glossy. We frame the photograph, hang it above the bank of registers. It vibrates against the wall, this hologram of memory.
Greg Nelson
Nameless Child
Never to blossom, you came and went before I knew. An hour ago, your younger half-brother called to wish me a happy birthday.
We talked, then in the warm light of the bay window, you returned. That summer I bussed tables, mesmerized by the blonde hostess in the mint dress
gliding back and forth across the dining room, and in the picture windows, the sun descending over the buttes and mesas of the Grand Canyon. In her trailer beneath the ponderosa pines, an ill-conceived word never passed between us. When the aspen began to shed their gold, I went back to school. She worked into the fall, then drove two thousand miles to my door.
My studio apartment was more of a closet, but like a good man-child, I welcomed her. Here, everything darkens. Months pass, we talk, and she leaves for home.
Weeks later, the letter arrives. I remember freezing rain and days of nightfall. Still, I have no quarrel with her. Fate is a stone
dropped into a glassy lake that widens like the sky. Without a ritual, in twilight's chill, I'm left to improvise. Nameless child,
I want to sing notes beyond my ken. I want to believe humility makes you a blessing. May the waves break on eternity's shore.
Julia Paul
Elegy for My Son
after a line by Jake
Skeets
The hollow heart is full of moth wings and candlelight.
The clock holding its hands to its face is the story of stumble.
The needle explains the worst-case scenario.
The face in the photograph is memoir.
The poem is a mouthful of commas.
The hand gathers the scattered branches.
The leafless tree is the throat of grief.
The corpse tells the story of lines and edges.
The ocean is prayer in every language.
The moon is prayer in every language.
The elegy is the brown bottle washed ashore.
The bottle is story of storm.
His name is the rain that falls from every sky.
His name is faithful to something small and bright, left burning.
John Long Hands
I. Peasant hands Van Gogh drew in his notebook. Rough work, hands hard in pencil as stooping peasants reach to harvest.
II.
Sway of a pot rising from earth and water. Tension, pressure from cupped hands form each shape. You need the touch to center clay then strength to pull the pot.
III.
To trace lines of a back feel muscles move under a caress. To shape love from two bodies of flesh and bone, I use my hands.
Michael Morris
In Lieu of a Painting in Progress
for
Mary Ann Bauer, 1937-2018
My grandmother’s one wish before Alzheimer’s was for me to paint her a white magnolia. A full blossom with moving anthers, filament, a heart of carpels. The preservation of a memory pollen from the real to imaginary oil & turpentine. Petals cupped into a need for different shades of white.
The flower needed to move the way I moved & grow the way I grew. I wanted the flower to belong to a litany of stories. My grandmother created her house’s geography in storied items:
The door my height was penciled on until I was taller than the door.
The infant of Prague statue presided over the guest room: a statue that could frighten, conspiring with the dark. Eyes appearing to impose judgment while oscillating. On an end table, an elephant statue facing the door, broken tusk mended with scotch tape. The table that toppled when I cracked my head teetering in a rocking chair on thresholds of too fast. I learned too late what limits existed until I tumbled into them. I wanted to be weightless.
I took the elephant down with me & broke the tusk. A painting would have written a new story without breakage.
But my efforts to blend shadows into a swaying movement never allowed the magnolia to become real
& my grandmother still wants a painting. I’m dragging my feet through her flexible dreams of her old house. Where magnolias came to her blooming through sleepless nights. Nights when I tried to sleep at her house that harbored a space we all know. Where thoughts become what we dream, what we see in the dark, what we remember & what might fade. She would always tell me:
We don’t have nightmares in this house.
Robert Cording
Spoonbills
Stuck inside our sadness, we thought we were deluding ourselves when a pair of pink birds a hundred feet above our windshield
lightened our view. They were birds we’d often seen—roseate spoonbills— but only earthbound, legs half-buried in the muck they plodded and stirred.
Above us, they’d become entirely new, their long necks elegant, their spoons invisible, their translucent pink wings gleaming as if every feather were remade
in the noon sun. We’d been talking about our son who had died when the spoonbills arrived in our vision. We pulled over, and stood there because it felt as if we’d become
the unintended center around which the pair turned ever-widening circles, climbing higher, each bird a stylus of light overwriting the day in shell-pink.
A Wren in the Rain
In this early morning’s dark cold, I manage my sorrow by watching a house wren in the rain.
Its white eye stripe reminds me of the way my son wryly arched his eyebrow when he smiled, both dimples appearing.
He’s dead six years, and I’m still turning everything I see into a sighting of him, even this wren
shaking the water out of its feathers, as if—I can’t help myself— to give my sodden mood an unexpected lift.
Steve Myers
The Barn
The great door slid shut, pigeons murmuring under the ridge beam, cattle lowing in the stalls below the threshing floor, the vast air’s throbbing silences buttressing the hay mow, granary, the white oak planks and struts, and high in the light-shot vault, the drift and slow-swirl of dust motes as if breath-blown, the susurration of another tongue.
Jim Daniels Touch
Back when the only moon was our basketball gray winter nights under playground floodlights until the ball froze into rock refused to bounce we mimed dribbling pushing the ball up and down between our frozen hands throwing up shots like David to the world’s Goliath the chain-link nets torn down, the rims disfigured but still but still star dust of the ball falling through the moon long gone behind clouds and snow and darkness the moon in our hands worn smooth by concrete and caress we blew on stiff frozen fingers so we could still have some touch.
Brad Davis
Old Man Poem
There are whole days I swear I smell something like auto exhaust in the dry air of our condo, a scent you say you’ve not picked up on, and I get suspicious of how tired I become mid-afternoons or when I try to read before bed. Most of those days I pass it off as an effect of COVID or the swim workouts I continue to put myself through. But today was different.
Today my eyelids grew heavy in late morning as I was reading online this NPR article about the hazards of poor indoor air circulation notably for the elderly, a population to which apparently we now belong, and especially in homes, condos, and apartments with gas appliances— which is indeed the case here at Sabin Landing where we’ve landed following retirement.
But what is this poem really about? Because so far all it sounds like is the worry of an old man who, with all kinds of time on his hands, has fallen prey to mortality anxiety, fearful of anything that could contribute to cutting short his momentary fling under a generous sun. You say this “piece” fails to sing like a proper poem. I say look how it bears a faint, stanzaic resemblance to one.
John Bargowski
Franklin Street (Jersey City)
Just kids, we thought he was a goner that morning we found him rolled onto his side with his pockets turned inside out in an empty lot a block from Ralph's Bar & Grill. Flies sipped at the blood oozing from the whack he'd taken on the back of his skull, and he didn't jerk his head or twitch when we poked him with a long stick and watched for a throb in his jugular. His hands belonged to a workingman, fingerprints whorled with oil and grease, and in those coveralls and scuffed steel-toes he could've been uncle or father to any of us, lying there with an ear pressed to the ground like he was listening for something we boys couldn't yet hear coming.
Eliza Carey
It is a sight, when you reach that simpatico of brews and kush. The world shatters and it is just you in an empty room. Music reaches up from the ground, stretches through your spine to your hands reaching out to the sky, fingers twirling with the tune. Your hips glide along, pave the way for the next song or beat that drops you to your knees. Knees, now your bones, branches, the chords, roots. Growing stronger, taller.
el árbol
Robert Claps
Mulch
The two yards of pine bark nuggets my wife had ordered Sit in the driveway, its scent as strong as the coffee I’m brewing.
May 1st and all the windows are open. Phlox overruns our rock wall. Bee balm sweetens the air.
Almost too much to bear, because on Route 17, a few miles From here, some high school kids built a shrine––white
Wooden cross heaped with plastic flowers, to mark the spot Where a car hit their classmate while she was out jogging.
How do we get out in the morning, knowing Heaven is distant and a breakable blue.
Pine nuggets don’t wash away. They decompose Slowly and put matter back in the soil.
When the coffee kicks in, I’ll step into my boots, Fill the wheelbarrow one shovelful at a time
And empty it down by the wooden mailbox, Spreading the mulch evenly across the beds
Careful not to bury the marigolds My wife has started from seed.
John L. Stanizzi
Ideas
I nearly drowned in the crescendo of snarled voices tangled in the inexplicable June humidity, come too early to be taken seriously until it brings us to our knees.
I have waited restlessly on this rotting porch in the searing heat of the night, shards of moonlight strewn on the decayed boards, whitewashed onto the leaves of huge black plants.
I have waited in white rooms where the walls were slick with the sweat of another season’s vulgar arrival, bursting into the room and taking over, as if it were supposed to be there.
I have waited on the old hilltop by the valley into which I’ve reached far, far too often for the impossible idea of forbearance, or perhaps even stumbling upon a poem hidden in the tall grass.
I witnessed a murmuration of starlings, always more miraculous than verse. I tried to hold onto an equanimity having nothing to do with me, but I dropped it and it smashed to pieces fretfully on the ground.
I turned in the direction in which I hoped my home might be, away from the hilltop.
There were no signs, no directions, just leaves changing color, drifting from branches, getting lost in the crowd.
After a few steps I turned back toward the hilltop by the valley where I knew my ideas would be waiting impatiently, knowing I would return.
They were eager to tell me to forget everything they had ever taught me. It was all just made up, anyway, even the part where they told me not to be afraid.
Elynor Melly Carey
Womb
Sunny blue skies above
Providenciales the month of my birth I swim to the reef off the beach unsure circling treasure I explore underwater hear the heartbeat of the earth my mother the rhythm of the waves breaking fast then slow darkness draws me beneath the tide with open eyes I see colors like never before life flourishing animals that look like plants we are all curious desire no harm can wound if one gets too close but salt is the salve and light lifts me from the depths riding waves contracting and crashing reborn upon the shore home again where I came from and where I must go from here
Alexandra Malouf
Texas Mornings
Oak trees creak and whisper outside. The bird who lives in our ceiling is trilling between the pipes and I wake with hair matted to my checks, a snarl for hummingbirds or roaches to claim. Yesterday's salt flakes away from my eyes as I prepare to heave my anemic bones from beneath their cloth shell, crawl half-naked into the biting cold where mold festers in the walls and God is Switzerland. It's there, I'd crunch an egg, add a gloopy plate to our sink—jambalaya of spoons. Maybe I'll pour a thin trickle over the black soil around my pothos, plumb the breadth of her arms and examine her for sores, like a doctor or half-crazed parent, but instead I writhe on the mattress, pull the mountain shroud of softness closer until I'm swathed in clouds and wait while thin squares of light travel laggardly across my room. Daylight wanes. Cicadas purr their alien chorus, and numb darkness seeps familiar through the window panes.
Allyson Wuerth
The Bald Eagle
Early on that Sunday morning in April my daughter and I stop in the middle of a quiet road and watch a bald eagle sharp faced, strutting around the front lawn of a red bricked house. Everyone inside still sleeping while sun sweeps grass into fractured piles of light.
And I want to run home to tell Dad about this: the eagle, the sun hovering only partially over a sweaty morning lawn, yesterday’s rain, the pond beyond this yard where we stand— its swampy fists clutching bouquets of cattails and reeds like the banks of the brook in our old backyard.
Then I’d say to him: “Tell me again about the fisher cat that almost got Snoopy. Remind me about the red-tailed hawk perched on our deck railing during that big snow storm in 1999. Tell me all over again how we watched it fly off into the swirling black of that night. Say Remember, Al?
Say "Al"
while my girl and I hold our breaths tight over this eagle who does not care about the sleepers in the brick house or the mother and daughter marveling at the matter of it, or the pond, or any of yesterday’s rain–how it stopped coming down in droplets and finally burst from the sky and swelled in veiny rivers down our street.
It does not care and instead reaches up its wings to the glossy sun and disappears
the way my father might have, his face never once looking back.
Not even at me, caught up in the branches of my morning, the sun highlighting the eagle on the grass, the sun lifting up an eagle with nothing but its own burn.
Not even at me, Dad? left to the brambles–but hopeful enough to wonder about the earthiness of the intangible— how birds could stir such ghosts, dawn, such birds.
Paul Martin
Vaudeville
Out of bed for a midnight piss, I step into the frame of moonlight on the floor and remember Jimmy Durante ending his routine with a sentimental song and, like a gentleman from the old school, doffing his hat, turning and walking slowly toward the back of the stage through smaller and smaller circles of light, looking over his shoulder one last time before disappearing into darkness, leaving our family in the living room those Saturday nights strangely quiet, each of us alone for a moment until the dressed-up chimps came tumbling out of the curtains grinning, followed by jugglers, a ventriloquist, a magician with a leggy assistant, a comedy sketch that included a cream pie in the face or a man caught in the spotlight with his pants down, a comic figure on spindly legs I wasn’t sure whether to laugh at or pity.
Aileen Bassis
Always in Winter
I lit two candles last Thursday that burned into Friday evening. One candle to remember you, mom, and one for dad.
I’ve forgotten every prayer but you come to me, lighting candles in a flowered housecoat, a dish towel on your dark hair, stockings rolled below your knees.
I look in the mirror and your smile peers back. Our flesh is soft under our chins and I bend knuckles that have thickened like yours.
Whiter than candles, snow is falling, white as bleached cotton stretched across a body.
A shovel’s scraping on the sidewalk. The metal blade taps, taps a few times and then footsteps recede, and with a muffled whoosh, someone shuts a door.
Krista Mitchell
Spring Skiing
Mount Snow, Dover, Vermont
There is still snow in the shadows, but this afternoon the entire mountain is melting. The beginner slope grows thinner & thinner, the pines a deeper green. Plowing through clumps of slush dirtied by mud, I see a woman ski past in nothing but a bra & yoga pants.
The ticket man juggles his scanner; his badge says he is from Jacksonville. The chairlift bars pinch my lower back; I wonder which vertebrae it is. My father makes a joke but I do not listen or laugh. The summer sun will soon expose everything & minute by minute I am already evaporating
Patricia Hale
Out back lies a snag of windfall debris, like a small beaver dam. It carries me back to a night spent on the edge of a pond— dark woods, a campfire, echoing slap of a beaver’s tail close followed by the thrash and splash of a dog giving chase.
I don’t have a dog now, and no beavers swim among the ducks that find this neighborhood of clay and poor drainage. The pool of flood water shrinks and grows, temporary but insistent, increasing its range year after year.
Some days when I wake I feel reborn. Some days when I wake I’m drowning. There’s just so much to forgive myself for. Some days one finger of my left hand locks up, bent like a trigger. I have to take the time to work it free, to get it straight again.
Snag
Contributors
Tohm Bakelas is a social worker in a psychiatric hospital. He was born in New Jersey, resides there, and will die there. He is the author of twenty-seven chapbooks and several collections of poetry, including Cleaning the Gutters of Hell. He runs Between Shadows Press.
John Bargowski's newest book is American Chestnut. His first book Driving West on the Pulaski Skyway won the 2012 Bordighera Prize. He is the recipient of fellowships from the NEA and the New Jersey Council on the Arts and Poetry Northwest's Theodore Roethke Prize.
Aileen Bassis is a visual artist and poet in New York City working in book arts, printmaking, photography, and installation. Her use of text in art led her to study the craft of poetry. She’s the author of two chapbooks, The Other Side of the Mirror and Advice for Travelers and other poems
Laura Browne-Lambert is the author of an independently-published novella, The Wood, and the creator and curator of the Underground Bookshelf, which celebrates diversity in literature and provides resources for accessing stories with diverse characters, content, and creators.
Daniel P. Carey Jr. studied English and poetry writing at Eastern Connecticut State University. A past contributor to Here, he lives in Manchester, CT, with his wife Rebecca and daughters Elle Sinéad and Áine Róisín.
Eliza Carey, born and raised in Bozrah, CT, found solace in New Haven's docks and Niantic's beaches. Now in Colorado, she immerses herself in improv culture. Her work has appeared in Interpretations Literary Journal, Here, and Wingless Dreamer.
Elynor Melly Carey is a Marriage and Family Therapist living in Bozrah, CT. Her inspiration to begin writing poetry comes from her three adult children, who've shown her how to take risks and pursue dreams.
Robert Claps is an amateur banjo player who drives his neighbors crazy. He lives in CT with his wife and rescue dogs. His first book, Casting, was published in 2021. Other work has appeared in Margie, Image, Paterson Literary Review, Tar River Review, and previously in Here.
Norah Clifford (she/her) grew up in Lambertville, NJ. A graduate of Franklin and Marshall College, Norah currently lives in New Orleans and works for the Tennessee Williams Literary Festival. She has been published or is forthcoming in The Wingless Dreamer Journal, In Parentheses, and The Listening Eye, among others.
Robert Cording has published ten books of poetry, the most recent of which is In the Unwalled City. A collection of new and selected poems is due out in 2025/26. His new work is out in The Hudson Review, The Southern Review, Poetry Northwest, Shenandoah, The Sun, and Orion. His poem "For Acedia" appears in the 2025 edition of the Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses anthology.
Whitnee Coy has an MFA in Creative Writing from Eastern Kentucky University's Bluegrass Writers Studio and has taught creative writing for thirteen years in various settings including at Oglala Lakota College, a tribal college on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. She has two chapbooks of poetry published, Kintsukuroi and Cicurate
Jim Daniels’s latest book, The Luck of the Fall, his seventh collection of short fiction, was recently published by Michigan State University Press. Recent poetry books include The Human Engine at Dawn and Gun/Shy. A native of Detroit, he lives in a condo in an old church on the Southside of Pittsburgh and teaches in the Alma College low-residency MFA program.
Brad Davis is a poet and theologian. His most recent book of poems is Trespassing on the Mount of Olives. He lives in Putnam, CT, with his partner Deb, a jazz vocalist. Their child is the bass player for Jojo Mayer and Nerve and a Grammy-winning recording engineer.
Nicole Farmer has published two books of poetry: Wet Underbelly Wind and Honest Sonnets. She lives in Asheville, NC. nicolefarmerpoetry.com
Maria Mazziotti Gillan is the author of twenty-four books. Her most recent publications include When the Stars Were Still Visible and a poetry and photography collaboration with Mark Hillringhouse, Paterson Light and Shadow. She received the 2008 American Book Award for All that Lies Between Us and is the Founder and Executive Director of the Poetry Center at Passaic County Community College in Paterson, NJ, editor of the Paterson Literary Review, and a Bartle Professor and Professor Emerita of English and creative writing at Binghamton UniversitySUNY.
Sitara Gnanaguru is a Tamil-American writer living in Connecticut. She is a proud of alumna of the University of Connecticut. Sitara hosts the Wintonbury Poetry Series, sponsored by the Bloomfield Public Libraries.
Patricia Hale’s publications include the poetry collections Seeing Them with My Eyes Closed and Composition and Flight. She has been awarded CALYX’s Lois Cranston Memorial Poetry Prize, the Sunken Garden Poetry Prize, and first prize in the Al Savard Poetry Competition. She lives in CT, where she serves on the board for the Riverwood Poetry Series.
Emma Johnson-Rivard lives in Minnesota, where she writes poetry and weird fiction. Her work has appeared in Fearsome Critters, Coffin Bell, Moon City Review, and others.
Kristi Joy Rimbach writes poetry and creative nonfiction centered around the struggles and beauty of living on this planet in a human body. Her work has appeared in The Write Launch, The Orchards Poetry Journal, Plants and Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. She lives in Goshen, CT, with her husband, their three kids, two dogs and a cat.
Mickie Kennedy (he/him) is a gay, neurodivergent writer who resides in Baltimore County, MD, with his family and a shy cat that lives under his son's bed. A finalist for the 2023 Pablo Neruda Prize, he earned an MFA from George Mason University. X:@MickiePoet; mickiekennedy.com.
Barbara Krasner's novel in verse, Ethel's Song: Ethel Rosenberg's Life in Poems co-won the 2023 Paterson Prize for Books for Young Readers, Grades 7-12.
Zero Ramos Laforga is a Filipino queer trans artist, writer, musician, and educator from the San Francisco Bay Area. His poetry has previously been published in Ignatian Literary Magazine, The Quarter(ly) Journal, and most recently in an upcoming issue of The Ana
Kevin LeMaster is the author of two chapbooks, In The Throes Of Beauty and Mercy. He has been nominated for a Pushcart twice and once for the Best of the Net anthology.
John Long is a poet and playwright. His poetry has appeared in journals including Connecticut River Review, Here: a poetry journal, Dark Horse, New Square, and the Hartford Courant. John's plays have been produced at theaters including Ensemble Studio Theater, Seventh Sign Theater, and Phoenix Stage Company.
Samuel Perez Lopez has been writing poetry for over 11 years, after having been introduced to creative writing at an academic camp the summer after 7th grade. With his writing, he hopes to bring forth not only his voice, but the voice of his community, and those that surround it.
Alexandra Malouf is a poet with work featured in Prairie Schooner, Pleiades, and Poetry Wales
Paul Martin has published two books of poetry, Closing Distances and River Scar, as well as three prize-winning chapbooks.
Krista Mitchell is a junior at UConn pursuing degrees in studio art and English with a concentration in creative writing.
Michael Morris is an MFA candidate at Bowling Green State University in Ohio, where he is also a graduate assistant currently teaching creative writing.
Steve Myers has published a full-length collection, Memory’s Dog, and three chapbooks. A Pushcart Prize winner, he heads the poetry track for the MFA in Creative Writing at DeSales University.
Greg Nelson is a former teacher and a depression survivor. He received an MFA in poetry from George Mason University and resumed submitting a few years ago after a brief hiatus of twenty-six years. Like John Lennon says, "Life is what happens while you're making other plans." Recent publications include poems in CATHEXIS Northwest Press, South 85 Journal, HeartWood Literary Magazine, and Atlanta Review. He lives in Suffolk, VA, near the Nansemond River.
Cait O'Kane lives & writes in Philadelphia, where she was born.
Julia Morris Paul is author of two full-length collections, Shook and Table with Burning Candle, and a chapbook, Staring Down the Tracks. Her poem, “Dear Coroner, How Could You Know,” first published in Here, appears in the 2023 Pushcart Prize XLVII Best of the Small Presses anthology. She serves as president of the Riverwood Poetry Series in Hartford and is an elder law attorney.
Timothy Pilgrim, a 76-year-old Pacific Northwest poet, has published several hundred poems in literary journals and two collections of poetry.
Pegi Deitz Shea is a two-time winner of the Connecticut Book Award for Children's Literature, She published her first book of poetry for adult readers in 2022, The Weight of Kindling. She is president of the CT Council of Poets Laureate and direct the Poetry Rocks series in Vernon, CT.
John L. Stanizzi is the author of Ecstasy Among Ghosts, Sleepwalking, Dance Against the Wall, After the Bell, Hallelujah Time!, High Tide – Ebb Tide, Four Bits, Chants, Sundowning, POND, The Tree That Lights The Way Home, Feathers and Bones. Viper Brain, and SEE
Steve Straight’s books include Affirmation, which has won the 2023 William Meredith Award for Poetry, The Almanac, and The Water Carrier. For many years, he was professor of English and director of the poetry program at Manchester (CT) Community College.
Bethany Tap (she/her) is a queer writer living in Grand Rapids, MI, with her wife and four kids. You can find more of her work at bethanytap.com.
Rachel Toalson is the author of eight collections of poetry and multiple books and novels in verse for adults and young readers, the most recent of which is the forthcoming Love, Sivvy (Little, Brown, 2026), a biography in verse about Sylvia Plath. Her poetry and essays have been published in magazines and literary journals around the world. She lives in San Antonio, Texas, with her husband and six kids.
Cali Turner (she/they), originally from Willimantic, ME, is currently an undergraduate double major in English and Creative Writing at the University of Maine at Farmington. If not found writing, you can almost always find Cali in a hammock or out hiking somewhere in the woods.
Christie Max Williams’s debut poetry collection, The Wages of Love, won the 2022 William Meredith Poetry Prize. He is also a writer and award-winning actor. Though originally from California and then NYC, he now lives in Mystic, CT, where he and his wife raised their daughter and son and where he co-founded and for many years directed The Mystic Arts Café.
Allyson Wuerth is a writer, a high school English teacher, and the owner/curator of All My Unicorns, her kitschy vintage shop (https://www.etsy.com/shop/allmyunicorns). She won the 1997 Leslie Leeds Poetry Prize. She graduated from SCSU and received an MFA in Poetry from the University of Pittsburgh. She lives in CT with her husband, children, and five adorable cats.
