The Journal of Undiscovered Poets, Issue Two, ( V.F ) by jlederman

Issue Number Two

The Journal of

Undiscovered

Poets

Our 1st Editors Choice Awar

d Goes to...

Exclusive Interview with Pau

l Hoover

Sixty New Poems

Pictures do me no good Aside from the irregular appearance of a field of daisies

p Th e s oul o f m y lov e tak es p lace in pict ures And t here i s color there is depth

there is motion My own takes place in words In all of my mind in all of my heart in every word and sound

o r t he s ha pe o f his mo ut h o f his h a nds o f his s h o ulders o r t he pictur es i n hi s soul ’ s e x pre s s i on

The

Issue Number Two 2021

Journal of Undiscovered Poets

Margaret Sullivan Editor in Chief

Jeff Lederman Creative Director

From the Editor Dear Poets, Welcome back, thank you for returning to Issue #2. We learned a few and a heightened respect for the abiding presence of rejection in things in publishing the Premier Issue, and would like to share some our lives as poets who strive to find an audience in a land of yet exciting developments. unknown publishers. Mostly, here’s hoping that every one of our 60 poets leads you into their poetic reality, and helps you discover Paul Hoover, editor of the Norton Anthology, Postmodern American Poetry something undiscovered. (2nd edition, 2013) and author of more than a dozen poetry collections, Yours in the page, gave our poet interview. He will renew your belief in the power of the poetic voice. His observations about the poets’ identity in the Margaret Sullivan Editor in Chief cyber world will lift you. Alexander Blackie of Devon, England is the Editors’ Choice for our first poetry prize (of $1,000 USD). You will see his poem, “The Prodigious Flowering of Rage of Francisco Goya”. Choosing the best poem in this reviewing period was daunting, as there was an abundance of profoundly good work. An honourable mention goes to Gene Twaronite for “Learning to Feel” (page 9). Dawn Killen-Courtney wrote to us in response to our rejection notice. It is posted here on this page. Leave it to an undiscovered poet to write a thank you note for a rejection letter--and get published for it. We took a tip from her, and made public here in these pages examples of alternative cover art concepts we tried and rejected. There are two times as many poets in this volume as there were in the Premier Issue. Not only did our community of poets expand, our reach across the world grew beautifully. Poets from five continents have been discovered for this issue. And, although we have not made a project of analyzing our demographics, it is interesting to note that one of our poets, who came to us from West Bengal, India, is sixteen years old. Here’s hoping reading this, our 2nd issue leads you to a renewed understanding of our identities as poets, and the varying challenges of writing in different forms; a renewed connection to visual art and poetry;

To the editors at the Journal of Undiscovered Poets:

It is not my habit to reply to editors writing me rejection notes, but in the case of

what you wrote here, I must make an exception. Am I disappointed to have not had any work chosen? Absolutely. You are right, the poet’s path can be discouraging and is not for the feint of heart. In fact, though I never stopped respecting the Muse when She came to call, I did stop submitting, for several decades, but am more or less at it again. What I wanted to try and tell you is that something about the thoughtfulness and understanding in your note leaves me with a feeling that I can and will go on, and doing so feeling myself to be part of a sort of “society of language”, one of the questers after the ineffable. And we just can’t help it. Perhaps that is why the response to the journal has been so overwhelming – poets feeling someone searching for that heart nugget in a poem. I so respect what you all are doing up there – the wildlife rehab and the beautiful journal. What you are attempting means a lot to many I am sure. I would certainly have been proud to appear in the Journal. All the best going forward, to all involved. Dawn Killen-Courtney St. Louis Park, MN, USA

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Alexander Blackie is the winner of our first Editors’ Choice Award.

Alexander Blackie

the prodigious flowering of rage of francisco goya

God forgive me, I have sinned mortally. Spared atrocities wreaked upon my folk by barbarous invaders who bloodily, savagely, slaughtered those under their yoke. Tortured, raped and mutilated brutally, murdered monks and every Commandment broke. While I stood by keeping a silent tongue as brave protesting ones from throats were wrung.

Painterly skills protected me from harm My portraits of the great, good and evil in great demand for me a lucky charm Safe, aloof above the great upheaval, I lost my mind, others their head or arm chopped off in the butchery primeval. Going ever so silently insane, awful images formed inside my brain.

Some, I witnessed myself around Madrid and sketched before engraving them on plates. But some images came to mind unbid of a nature a disturbed brain creates as into a deep depression I slid filled with rage no laughter or love abates, plumbing the depths of sick depravity unable to fathom its gravity.

Anupriya Kumari we don’t need ears

I used to think only my walls could speak, but when I pressed my head against all the other walls, my ears involuntarily put each other on fire, for I could hear the bricks and mortar speaking to me, and in a voice that my breathless body seemed to have known. I wanted to but my brain was too tired to understand that walls don’t have voices and we don’t need ears to listen to our own.

Gene Twaronite

learning to feel First we must learn to read the signals then record them in neural maps of the self to tell us which emoticons to use

Growing older we learn to read more complex signs as the map grows bigger and the self moves out into the world

Some things are easy to read like two old friends anger and fear who barge in without notice and never want to leave

We learn guilt embarrassment and shame noting their every stinging detail learning how to finesse and suppress them when the cost of feeling becomes too dear

We learn what love is by the marks it leaves on us We learn to feel the pain of another and how to make it ours

And I will learn when you are gone there are no signals to tell me what to feel

We learn to listen for the gentle rap when joy comes calling

Jean Varda

there never was a poem There never was a poem there was only the black gushing oil that covered the eyes of sea turtles with fire and opened thousands of tiny graves for the passage of sea birds, dolphins, seals manatees and whales there never was a poem there was only the weeping of tarry sand and bubbling dead water there was only the violence of greed the hopelessness of despair there was only the pleas of children the innocence of fish there never was a poem there was only imaginary money polyester people and a fool holding a megaphone shouting out directions taking us down in the black sinking sludge

Robert Keim

onion of passion

Start with an idea Start with an onion Onion on a cutting board Onion from the crisper drawer Drawer of firm vegetables Drawer of future soup Soup to feed the poet’s soul Soup to cure the common cold Cold days feeling uninspired Cold nights feeling over tired Tired of the same same same Tired of this empty feeling Feeling compulsive Feeling hungry Hungry for a poem to come Hungry for some hearty soup Soup flavored with Whitman’s marrow Soup that starts with his sort of rawness Rawness of starchy emotion Rawness of aromatic images Images of stiff green celery stalks Images of bright chunked carrot snips Snips sautéing in olive oil (dash of salt!) Snips of memory softening Softening and blending into metaphors

Softening with those onions now translucent Translucent as distant dreams Translucent as childhood kisses Kisses snuck behind the bushes or Kisses from great grandma Grandma gave this life recipe Grandma said to let things simmer Simmer with love like chicken stock Simmer then add the bag of herbs Herbs are like adjectives Herbs like just the right verbs Verbs of action rather than being Verbs like heat and sear and cook and flavor Flavor the soup Flavor for sharing Sharing ourselves Sharing is why Why we cook these chunky poems Why we cook anything Anything at all Anything with passion Passion and heart Passion pulsing Pulsing… Heart…

Matthew Lee

othellosclerosis

In the fragile predawn still ice on the bridge to the hospital is invisible until it cracks I slip & I flip. Faith hunches over her gnarled hands grip the edge of the exam table a kyphotic gargoyle praying before the ledge. Her heart has lost the beat the only tune she’s forgotten but her green eyes glisten white wisps & thin lips electric as she tells me her story: That morning her toothbrush fell into the sink spraying a ribbon of white foam across her reflection drooling ancient curses mint made bitter.

Ten minutes scrambling for the towel the phone the words before she began to awaken blinking away, waving away the navy yellow haze. She thought she saw—no she saw—her husband in his floppy fishing hat coming through the garage late as always. Does the moon yawn? Or is it already asleep dreaming of melting into a puddle of glass?

G ina Tranisi

nothing comes out alive on the online dating site, trout clubbed, gutted, ropes of silver laundry hung to dry. Boys arrange birds in death bouquets, hold deer, felled like sick trees, by scruff of neck, no time to shut eyes, glittered as scales on dead fish, flightless, open— a boy’s smile after his first kill. A girl swipes right, a gun fires. A boy starts a fire, roasts the girl who is a bird, who is a pig, on spit. Before this, a boy spits on the girl who says no. No one sees the boy holster the girl. The girl is not a gun. The gun is a girl. Small killing machine, cleaned, cradled, locked up or laid to rest like any dead thing. When farmers find dead things in fields, they call policemen. Policemen appear, uniformed stars dotting prairie grass, golden, the color of every gunned girl’s hair. They find the girl’s hair, sometimes recover the rest of her. The rest of her goes on missing, the family worships nothing, nothing comes out alive, a life—a girl’s life—weighs as much as a gun.

Morgan Liphart

medusa writes a letter to the modern woman I am you. You are me. We’re more alike than different. Please know I wasn’t always this way – dripping venom and fangs. I was white as the dogwood tree in summer, blooming and soft around the edges. I knelt to pray by the water, a calm sea turned wild, foaming and swirling, then suddenly Poseidon leapt forth, dripping, and held me down, swallowed me up. I didn’t get the chance to run. Became this. I rushed to the island of Sarpedon, with crumbling cliffs and shadowed groves of trees. It was the only place safe enough to hold me. Now, in my dreams I drown wild horses in the waves of the sea. I lead them out by the bridle, watch their hooves, once powerful against the earth, like flint on stone, become useless, sinking deep into the sand. I let the tide have them, at last they rest. And I think that I am each horse. Each morning I wake, turn my face from the filtered light, and wish I could rest and rest or grow white wings to fly away.

Lee Dunn cubbyhole

There’s a place of peace and rest, I think. In daydreams there are hints. But lost they are in just a wink, and leave no fingerprints. My valley is of rolling green, with castles in the mist, and starry glitter nightly seen as by the heavens kissed. At torment’s end, forgiveness. Release from worldly cares. A pardon’s leave to live in thisa rarity of airs. Though just a dream, I hold it fast, abandoning it never. In days of present, future, past, it holds me close, forever.

Note from the creative director: you will notice 4 or 5 alternative journal cover designs inserted throughout this issue. Apparently poets aren’t the only ones living with rejection.

F letcher F i tzgibbon necessary spaces

in the clickity-clack efficiency of necessary spaces we forget the laundry machine lives of our supposed ‘alternative’: the square footage-per-dollar density, the side hustle, the 0% occupancy, the spin-class-at-5-before-the-kids equilibrium. here, under industrial high-contrast lighting where shadows no longer exist (perhaps faintly, behind beige rubber curtains) 3 x 8-hour shifts of supervision ensure isolation is a term only used to narrow down symptoms. here, a mat beside the bed connected to an alarm an “ever-chiming bell” signals the arrival of a helpful visitor, a friend even hoisting us back onto retractable beds with stick-your-chin-out dignity. here, there’s nothing to leave on the stove thanks to square servings of nutritional methodology and paper cups held on stiff palms, while terrycloth bibs catch the snacks (again, the dignity). gulp. back in the spinning machine a formula is bandied about: quality of life / wait list = days prolonged (until, of course, a relative proves to be the exception).

we think it is here, in the consistently 21 degree call-me-by-name for the weekly sponge bath cold coffee delivered in plastic mugs shirts lifted for the pokey pokey necessary space— where they’ll cry for us and hard— thinking it is here where we will be forgotten. maybe we’re just afraid of the question: why forgetting the why not of this seemingly senseless life. and while cost thresholds and budgets are abstract things easy to compartmentalize perhaps so too are those in hydraulic wheelchairs staring out the if-lucky-window at found objects in the hospital garden: a bird feeder, a bauble, a daffodil shoot. if we’re lucky one day it might be us pretending we’re in vipassana thankful for the mantra: humanize humanize humanize trying to make eye contact with our friend tying the loose ends of the bib wishing—or not wishing—we were somewhere else.

for it is never us (we don’t want to be forgotten!)

YvonneNicole Mais el de St. Croix this is going to bounce

Gumball dime deep in cranking silver turns orange sphere twirling into my palm This is going to bounce. like the rent check I mortgaged workaday off my paycheck will half cover then we’ll have to figure how long until the next month is check and This is going to bounce. Like my husband separated while 300 miles of so in distance all while my lulled our son to sleep and he found another bed to sleep in soundly, no problem around 300 miles away 300 miles in gas would buy a lot of dime drops or high rubber balls in all colors or at least some back rent. For now I’ll twist the handle and hope that what falls out comes back up to me.

Devin West

the rich and the rest of us poem

The dying in the street poem, The ones we never meet poem, The isolated and mutilated poem, The insulated and inundated poem, The heart of the matter poem, The heart that is shattered poem, The broke and brown poem, The bleek and frowned upon poem, The stranger and alien poem, The Free and the brave poem, The careless and curious poem, The conservative and thieving poem, The all eyes on me poem, The my pockets are just for me poem, The tale of the tape poem, The tell of the rope poem, The empty shell they left poem, The scars they don’t want to own poem, The leave me alone poem, The I can’t breathe poem, The, where are my rights poem, The, where is your fight poem, The good, the bad, the ugly poem, The, my heart grieves at their side of the story poem........

Kerrie Lindo

a prayer against disaster

I stand alone at daybreak watching clouds as the kettle boils I warm milk in a bottle, coffee in a cup I walk back to the bedroom to see if my men are up. Two moon faces on the pillow The musty morning smell of males Two humps of bottom floating Like the humpback of a whale. Oh God, don’t ever take from me the things I love the most: The washing machine, the fridge, the thing that browns the toast Take them instead but leave for me Those two extra that make me three. I stand alone at daybreak but my heart is full of love I close my eyes and pray And make a deal with those above, I’ll never moan that washing socks is not the life for me, Or the endless peeling of endless spuds boiled endlessly for tea If I can stand each day at daybreak, alone whilst the kettle boils Then warming milk and coffee will be my endless, blessed toil. Let my men be there forever gently sleeping in my bed And let it be my joy each morning to bend, and kiss their heads

Leah Ryder swirl

I am filled with such longings an urgent drive to be far and everywhere To be salivating in the aromatic pause before new tastes gasping with sparsely-aired lungs at audacious heights filled with presence baked golden and sweet by its addicting novelty Even the sky itself does not seem so unreachable if I depart earlier than the world A staff of resolve guides my hand to climb the winds as hawks ride thermals below my feet I would not hesitate to swirl the clouds with my hands molding blue and white worth noticing by girls and women in their yards inspired to pack restless on their backs and begin Join and swirl molding the longings that drive us to our window sills and sigh into the stars

Mallory Meeks around

The only way that you are able to look at me Is by looking straight through me As if I am air I don’t blame you If I could choose to not exist to you, I would I would be somewhere else Far far away Or you would But here we are Trapped in the same room A vessel A cell A straight jacket --I don’t want to be around you either

Lisa Ashley

breaking ground

When my father entered the room we got out of his chair. My mother served him first, macaroni, beef, boiled beans. Each spring we pulled weeds, picked rocks, cleaned the soil for the tomatoes, the patch of squash. I worked beside him, smelled his beer sweat, bent under the weight of his anger, his insults to our mother— She smells like a dead fish down there. I left of course, returned when my son was three, the house stuffed and filthy, the garden a jungled lot. We searched for root remnants in that old river bed soil, walked between the rows looking for beans, green treasures beneath broad leaves, finding only stones that pinged into grey steel buckets. Dead now, the old man, his garden. Back home my son takes small stones from his pocket, places them one by one in the dirt beside his tomato plant.

Hugh McGillvray beggar’s banquet

But all of the combined literature of western culture is Less an awe-inspiring performance of nature. Reading or writing we are not pilgrims, Walking on our knees up some hallowed mountain. Just caterers and guests at a buffet that is, We decide, one for all. So I can stand At the edge of creation Stricken Perhaps relate it. But These capers, these dubloons of inspiration I bring Will be little more than Extra flavours In this buffet For mortals

Mark MacAllis ter lake sixteen

A more thoughtful man would collect a precise few drops in an appropriate vial and label each for display where they could stay forever cold and gin-clear but what I prefer is to swallow a few unfiltered and unwise mouthfuls ignore the skating bugs the tannin beaver fever and the taste of tin each wets the part of my brain that recites lakes like a jesus prayer Kawaguessaga is lovely second language Namekagon and Shisheboganna the names of sincere gods soon we all will worship only water at Lake Sixteen which deserves a title more lyrical I remained for hours to witness a water dance of loons returning to my truck in the near dark a single snowflake arrived (it would be a winter to remember) and it fell so fast my tongue barely caught it

Celine Coschizza world views

I’ve got a nice view from here you privileged prick cradling the silence how’s your view? it’s often obscured a twisting kaleidoscope in front of my eyes well said stranger

shake shake twist all I am is an imagined form all you see is my projection of the wind in the shape of sarcasm a fresh scent of false security

dream states master

twist of the hand of God. the Gods? the kaleidoscope, it’s in my own hand but I’m no god. who is what is the wind blows over the sand and waters rippling the colours of the waves as the sun sinks lower into the night

shake shake twist twist oceans gone you are on a curb you are in a grey office box mother’s in a state again

this is my world view until my fingers slip again until my eyes cloud over in grey again until

cha cha mamba that was my last encounter with a fern a worm, alone, slips into the soil and emerges in China where they’ve invented a robot to milk us honey

oh obscurity is just another reality I’ll put my glasses on instead clearer head? no oh clarity is subjective you don’t wear glasses oh.

blending you and you into an image so beautiful at first full of ocean breezes and sweet smelling sunsets…

cChChShwshhhht time is snipped into pieces as this mirror coloured lens reflects the shallow space behind my eyes

Franklin Agogho cultured

narcissism

You should shun the lie that when you stand in the town’s square And toss the coin into the needer’s pan You transcend the state of those under And rise to a utopia of selflessness and true love. Lies! You forget the admiring eyes You forget the nods approving your being You forget the needer’s worship, albeit to God But you know that in partaking in that divine glory You engrave importance unto your name Me! It is all about me! In the streets of strangers sharing fake smiles In offices with colleagues looking over shoulders We learn to put ‘we’ in the place of ‘I’ We learn the delicate art of fanning our fame In the middle of another’s song We learn to cry the true cry So well that even in a breakup We conceal the hurt of wasted time With seeming tears of love My pastor said this about me My Imam advised me Even the witch doctor works for my good But, no, we disagree, it is not about me We scream that our acts are of love

And swear only by the greater good A greater good which is swept under the carpet At the least interference with ‘me’ It’s me My money, my enterprise, my will My sweat, my genius, my skill My good mind to offer employ A show of God in my deploy And you said love? Do you mean that feeling of filling yourself With the sense of security Which your soul yearns in another? How is it not about you And less about the other? How does this not seek self-elevation? Giving because you want to receive? Yes, war, strive, hatred Racism, violence and world order Expressions of a dangerous complementarity Called cultured narcissism The truth is in death, or the will to die For the good of the other Because their good is the fuel that drives your existence Jesus took our transgressions so that we could live, so that we could have a chance. That is true love That is serving without self.

Steven Dale Davison brooksy

I calibrate the road conditions by the strength of Brooksy’s clutch. He fears the sheets of ice— his one good hand grips my forearm, his one good leg leads with short, quick, anxious steps. He is unself conscious by now, accepting his needs along with the weather. In his stumbling, dignified grace, he gets by.

He always leaves a tip rolled up inside the bills, small, but how much does he make as the high school stadium watchman? He couldn’t run a vandal down, but he knows the teenage faces. Has he ever danced with a woman, Benny Goodman searing undamaged neural pathways with passions schooled in jazz? Has he ever hit a solid single and then turned the double, sliding into second laughing through his running feat?

His cane is made of ash, his eyes are made of pain, his mouth is made of smiles, with jokes about the dispatcher, even though he’s roamed for years the same empty stands echoing with young people’s cheers and the ghost of lost athleticism; gone home each night to the same dull street in a taxi with Alice or me. The full-timers won’t take him. He takes too long. And maybe he knows their faces.

A Conversation With Paul Hoover Paul Hoover is editor of the Norton Anthology, ‘Postmodern American Poetry’ (2nd edition, 2013). He has authored more than twelve poetry collections and is co-editor of the literary magazine ‘New American Writing’. An internationally recognized novelist (Saigon, Illinois, 1988), essayist and translator, Paul Hoover is a professor at San Francisco State University. Editor in Chief Margaret Sullivan and Paul had a conversation recently. Here’s what happened. Margaret Sullivan: I think of you as a poet because your poetry is how I learned about you. But you are a novelist, essayist, a writer in many forms. What is that like? Is your life different when you are writing prose than from fiction from poetry from not writing at all? Are your thoughts and feelings and behaviors different? Do you feel your voice or identity shifting? Paul Hoover: The first challenge to my identity as a poet was deciding to write the novel, Saigon, Illinois, based on my experience as a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War. Feeling challenged, I wrote it quickly so I could hurry back to poetry. There was even a blush on my face as I wrote some evenings, my twin sons jostling at the baby gate. As soon as I had a first draft five months later, I shared it at a reading at which my office mate, Larry Heinemann, was present. He very generously suggested that I send a chapter to Veronica Geng at The New Yorker, who had asked him for work. She immediately accepted chapter 13, “Demonstration,” and when I told Pat Mulcahy, Maxine Chernoff’s editor at Vintage Contemporaries, she quickly accepted the manuscript I had submitted. The book’s publication changed my profile as an author. A Hollywood producer wanted me to fly straight to Los Angeles to discuss script ideas, and Chicago Magazine listed me as one of fifty cultural figures to watch in the following year. Thinking I now had to be a novelist as well as a poet, I wrote a second novel, December, an academic farce about a professor of critical thinking who does close readings of every little thing that happens to him. He hears a sound in the middle of the night, and it takes him 15 pages of close thinking to get down the stairs. Editors at Penguin USA and Farrar Straus strongly considered it, but Penguin already published David Lodge and Malcolm Bradbury, whose themes are similar. A senior editor at Farrar presented it to the board of editors and soon left the company when they rejected it. I could have found a publisher, but doing so felt like crossing a line in the sand. I pulled the book from further consideration and returned to poetry. My next project was to write a book-length poem in 30 sections, “The Novel: A Poem” (New Directions, 1990).

I could have found a publisher, but doing so felt like crossing a line in the sand.

Of all my many activities--poet, novelist, essayist, professor, editor, curator of reading series, translator--the activity that has most challenged my poetry production is the anthology. It takes two years of steady work to prepare an edition, so it is hard to do anything else at the time. I like writing poetry best, followed by teaching and writing essays, but all of it is interrelated.

MS: As an expert in postmodern poetry, what do you think of author identity in the age of cyberpoetry? We have published in this issue a piece I think of as Flarf. I remember as a teenager cutting up headlines in magazines and pasting them together in collages I named poetry. I think I used the language ‘deconstructing’. But that was a long time ago. Where do you think all this is going, and where do you think it started? Was it with Dada? Was it before that? PH: There is no death of the author, no matter what they say. Someone has to have the experiences and point of view the writing demands. Nevertheless, a machine can write poetry, and it can be clever as well as lyrical. It does not know when its expressions are sad or witty, because it has no judgment, no taste, and no sense of beauty. But its recombinant procedures can create beautiful accidents as words and phrases come together in a new syntax. I know this from using Travesty, an old DOS black screen software created by Hugh Kenner, in the 1990s. The poems thus created appeared in Viridian (University of Georgia Press, 1997). The language submitted to Travesty was my script for Joseph Ramirez’s independent film of the same title. The procedure brought me closer to lyricism than I had been. That happened because, out of the cybernetic mess, I harvested the juicy bits. Cybernetic means are not self-sufficient. Someone has to sculpt the poem out of the larger search results.

Nevertheless, a machine can write poetry, and it can be clever as well as lyrical.

The cut-up method began with Tristan Tzara, the Romanian Dadaist, doing exactly what you describe, using language excised from the newspaper. Max Ernst was the first to use it as a visual artist, in The Hundred Headed Woman. The Wasteland and other modernist long poems use pastiche, fragment, as well as found and researched materials. Dada also gave us the performance poem and acceptance of the absurd. In studying Oulipo, I learned that some experimental procedures, such as the lipogram, existed in ancient times. According to “History of the Lipogram” by Georges Perec, “Nestor of Loranda . . . rewrote the Iliad, but he denied himself the alpha in the first canto, the beta in the second, the gamma in the third, and so forth until the mutual exhaustion of both the alphabet and the work.” I don’t know what to expect of the cybernetic future. For some writers, the computer is just a typewriter with improved revision function. But it has also encouraged people to write long poems, cut and paste, and create visual poetry (Susan Howe). All these methods have been used for more than a hundred years, long before computers. The Australian poet John Tranter told me he has an application that evaluates one’s style of writing and can thereafter produce poems on its own in that manner. I imagine that by the tenth poem produced, the effect would be unbearable for its lack of curiosity. The fun of poetry is in writing “intuitively,” as Jackson Mac Low called the old-fashioned way, because you do not know where you are going until you get there. Having a prescribed method doesn’t have to inhibit intuition. MS: You are also a translator. I studied Russian in my youth in an attempt to pursue a dream to translate undiscovered Russian poets. I got over it when I realized that I would never be any good at it. I couldn’t even get into the poetic mind of someone from another gender, much less another language and culture. But you are so good at it.

What can you tell us about the value in experiencing the poetry of others? How do you do it? PH: I began to translate around the age of 50, when Maxine and I translated selected poems of Friedrich Hölderlin one summer. At the same time, I began translating Vietnamese poetry with my friend Nguyen Do by email exchange, always three poems per message. Your phrase “getting into the poetic mind of someone” is exactly right. You are trying to figure out what they meant to say, and in that process you become a version of the author. In translating Hölderlin, we would puzzle and puzzle until the “aha!” moment, when it all came clear. Translation’s moral purpose is that of cannibalism. You eat the brain of the professor, the thigh of the athlete, because you so admire those features in them. What we discovered in Hölderlin was the strength of his lyric, not his “radical grammar” (George Steiner). That was what nourished us. In sticking to Hölderlin’s ancient Greek measures, which he stuffed into German, translators like Michael Hamburger sought the wrong prize. In translating, it is vital to select a poet whom you admire and can stand to be with, poem after poem. You may wonder how it is possible to translate from a language you don’t perfectly understand. There are several answers to that question: good dictionaries, fierce determination, someone trustworthy to vet the work, or a native speaker with whom to collaborate. On my own, I translated two chapbooks of the Mexican poet María Baranda, Narrar (To Tell) and Yegua nocturna corriendo en un prado de luz absoluta (Nightmare running on a Meadow of Absolute Light). I then asked my graduate poetry student from Mexico City, Aurelia Cortés Peyron, to look it over. Together, Maria and I have translated the complete poetry of San Juan de la Cruz, the mystical Spanish poet of the 15th century. That book is coming out from Milkweed Editions in spring, 2021, with three preliminary essays by me. Three years ago, Yale University Press asked me to edit and arrange the translations for The New World Written: Selected Poems of María Baranda (spring 2021). In the course of preparing that book, the translator assigned to Arcadia had to drop out. I translated the entire book in three months. Aurelia checked the text for accuracy and shared translation credit.

You may wonder how it is possible to translate from a language you don’t perfectly understand. You ask about the value of translating others. Auden said that all poets should translate and cook. It’s about taking care of the language as you would the food. There is little risk of negative influence. You feel you are growing as you do it. MS: I wanted to show our undiscovered poets what it is like to move from writing poetry to other forms—novels, essays. I wanted our readers to learn about how editors think, what informs the experience of a curator creating an anthology. I wanted to share your understanding of what happens in translation, how it feels to move into the mind of another language. Perhaps mostly, I wanted to encourage our undiscovered poets to engage in an ongoing self-analysis of their own identities as they shift in their lives as creators of poetry. I think you have done what I was hoping for and then some. Thank you.

The collected poems of Margaret Sullivan Signed copies available through www. undiscoveredpoets.com

100% of book sales goes directly to support the work of Island Wildlife Rescue on Salt Spring Island, BC Canada

Gene Twaronite

a ship made of matchsticks

(constructed from online book reviews)

wild confused disjointed and improbable sometimes slack and sometimes bulging a cacophony of jangling misused words certainly quite a little too long reads like it was written on a typewriter— by a typewriter stupefyingly long stretches of near inertness a life-drainer so dense and so dull that time and light seem to bend around it a compound of vulgar depravity and unnatural horrors hard not to feel revulsion for everything while reading this book— the human body sex thought and life itself searches heaven and earth for a commandment but searches in vain evinces neither power nor inclination to come to grips with any vital human problem a vacancy where the beating human heart should be a ship made of matchsticks in a bottle is a feat of construction but not necessarily a great work of art the final blow-up of what was once a remarkable if minor talent as unacquainted with art as a hog is with mathematics what has never been alive cannot very well go on living

Eric Noel Perez this poem ain’t jazz

I love how Bird’s sax attacks tracks, hijacks the soul’s tax with offbeat hacks, riffs so hot they melt wax, and the sky’s blown by Louis’ strong arm, planetary cheeks, blustering charm, barbaric yawp or low hum, all is free, ‘cept this poem. Too much meter, too much rhyme, too tight a verse, too tidy time

we ride inside the heart’s turbulent tide, and swim in the sea of sound God gave us. But they all knew then, as I know now, ain’t no words ever been born that can catch wind, thicken skin, erase sin, hold the storm or control a swarm. But I ain’t gotta hold it down, just grab hold of the Count’s cape, and be flown around.

for Etta’s romancin’, and Nina’s entrancin’, trying to two-step while the Blue Monk’s dancin’,

This poem ain’t Jazz. It’s a short finger pointing at rollicking starlight, the difference between running a windmill, and flying a kite.

if Ella’s the queen, Ellington’s the Duke of a syncopated heart no beat can rebuke.

So, let’s watch the mad moon swing, and let love map the fall of rain:

I say “synchronize,” they say “improvise.” I say “sunny days,” they say “starry skies”: Sarah’s sass, Etta’s trials, Billy’s blues walked a thousand Miles Davis, we pray bent notes will save us-

‘cause the night’s up for grabs, ain’t nothing more to add, no need to bargain, we’re riding to Harlem in a hot Cab, or a Cold Train.

Sydney Cardew strange waters

It was on the shore I learned the contours of the world The shape, the curve, the limits The child blind drunk on stolen gin The buzzcut young men Who spat in my hair and beat me in the bus station The older men with dark pasts Who loitered near the public toilets The tramp who showed us how to warm ourselves Hands in the dryer, backs to the ill-starred cubicles Coats stuffed with unsold Daily Mails Stolen from the newsagent steps The certain pubs where they’d serve anyone The ambulance with the stomach pump The distant lights of Portsea That might as well at times have been the moon And by the river, in another life A different river than the one they hauled him from The summer breeze, heady with crematorium fumes The weeping mothers, weeping wives Mead poured for the old gods, White dust on a mourner’s lapel Whiskey in the smoke-filled kitchen And the shore again, the southern shore now Waves from the headwaters of the Amazon That crumble the Jurassic coast The flies, buzzing in the brackish chine And the revelation, coming hard “Que solamente vas a matar a un hombre!”

Kay Krattli

the art of forgetting The art of forgetting is to remember, to look closely at each scab until you notice it is healing See how the edges are receding like a pond in drought, leaving a sweet pink line of new skin where you are rebuilding yourself Run your hand over the wound, there is no pain now, no oozing, no brightness, just a drying, dying map of ancient history Study this cipher until you see the hidden Rorschach image of yourself already a survivor, already enduring Brave enough to remember, you will have earned the forgetting, but you won’t need to You will simply float forward in the current letting the past swirl in eddies upstream, as you move toward the inevitable next wound.

Ritika Chand-Bergfeld unsettled

double space doubles tennis tennis court court of honor on my honor I solemnly swear I swear I swear on ______ grave, shhhh, don’t say it, he isn’t gone yet, but soon will be and all I can do is watch and wait, and know that mom is slowly losing her mind as she too watches and waits, undistracted. It’s so hard to let people be people and make choices that will hurt them, and in the end will kill them

Robert Garner McBrearty if i were

If I were to send an email to you if I even knew your address, I might tell you I was having a mocha in a little café. We are old here and we are dying, but the old have time to hang out in cafes. If I were to send you an email you might send one back at me though we haven’t spoken in years and I fear you might be dead in which case you would never answer, but I might be more afraid if you did.

Susan Johnson

death gets brighter every year A little embarrassing walking through so much beauty. The pond is human-made, the path as well, and so of course my eyes and brain, but these leaves have done it on their own, wanting to flame. Death gets brighter every year. Poison ivy in hues of orange juice and marigold wraps a rusty oak, like ribbons wrap a May pole, an October pole. Brilliant scalloped mushrooms bloom on a decaying trunk—to be that expressive, flamboyant. Why not? If you were a rotting log, what better way to go? See yourself as sugar maple, growing new leaves each spring only to watch them die and fall. Wouldn’t you want them to glow like shimmering pebbles of light? Drab as a shoe, all I do is blister.

Katja Juscha Grunther wet sand

Ripple, tide, and turn This day, this fateful hour, Circle, tide, and turn again Round this This lament to all that is. This death-dealing sea: Rock-ripped barnacle, the scoured empty shell, Storm-tossed this far flung spiralling life, Moon and sun, light, dark, beauty brutal and transcendent, the mystic eternal stars, Reflected in wet sand. Each grasping moment hovers, blindly seeking A prayer of forgiveness (they know not what they do) Circle again, turn and turn... What monstrous reflection now Oh Kali shadow-swallowing earth? But circle and turn, turn and turn again, To this, this perfect, cloud-obscured, Rainsoaked, imperfect and dazzling day. To this, Yes, …to this…

Ellis e Ramos

unspoken thing SPIKE!

AND ALL THAT’S LEFT BEHIND

Violent sparks of lightning

are white lines and lies and broken minds

speeds up the nose enters the brain aaaaand SPIKES! Insane, crazy Dorothy her teeth all came out to play put Aoki on and turn off all the lights dance without rhythm dance without form and SPIKES! Stars bleed out of starving eyes stomach empties and does the twist Denial twist, Euphoric tango far out in the tangerine sky SPIKES! One day I was free and twenty –one the next I’m thirty and overwhelmed

And yet--Seven minutes until departure eight hours until sobriety I open the door to the unspoken thing, submerge myself to the other side: This is the world I surrendered my life to This is the only world I know ADDICTION IS A MONSTER I CANNOT STOP FEEDING. This is where I have discovered the stained, ephemeral wonder. This brave new world marked by brain twitches and speeding hearts So we hop on this bus that can only go “Futhur” The Intrepid Traveler and his Merry Pranksters Chanting the ancient songs of our brothers and sisters— Forgive us Mother, for we are no longer sound, Goodbye Holy Father, for we have been found.

Charles Patton

metaphor for peace

(true story)

I saw a bay in Tampa As calm and smooth as glass Not a ripple or a swell Perfectly flat and peaceful Then along came a small boat Moving slowly, at idle As it passed, the bay trembled, waving back and forth in swells, And soon left and right, and then all over, far and wide For an hour and more, it moved with not another boat passing The bay never returned to peace, Not over the rest of the day, as other boats came and went, and maybe never, for all I know Like the butterfly effect, those waves may travel the world Like creating Peace is hard and destroying it is easy

Beth Ford

Roo Suites 2006 As a set of friends we’ve had no grand experiences. My fondest memories are of hours spent on couches, intoxicated or not. I don’t know what we spoke of. Your laughter rings in my ears longer than the words that were funny. Our conversations were pointless. They will certainly not change the universe. They will certainly not be recorded, except by me, who likes to remember the stupid jokes we made playing never-have-I-ever on a brown-stained university-owned couch, who likes to remember the way you sat resting your feet on the coffee table as we passed around secrets like a grown-up version of hot potato. Hours that in memory seep into my bones like alcohol into the sofa.

E llaraine Lockie

an attempt at immortality Imagine someone dying for you An entire religion was founded on it—Anonymous Poet She discovered the secret to possessing him after he wouldn’t leave his wife and kids It lurked from the beam in the basement Trembled on the bristle of the rope It didn’t even require an epistle to become his religion

Who among his audience wouldn’t be seduced by the Shakespeare of it Wouldn’t see a shadow of themselves in the blood red sun of self-loathing And what woman wouldn’t want to become more vibrant than the eggshell blue of eternal

It was he who wrote the burning hell inside Guilt filling him like water to the point of burst Until it leaked down an arm through fingers that spoke their way into print To anyone who ever suffered the cancer of silence Who sought anesthesia in single malts Zoloft and Xanax

When one woman did open him with surgeon hands and a healer’s heart to drain like a dam broke loose He sacrificed her to repentance And when that offering wasn’t enough to salvage a sound night’s sleep He lay literary success on the altar beside her The dull blade of guilt more deadly than a surgeon’s knife

She unearthed a talent in him for other topics that over time rivaled her dark spirit He wrote of the sea, city life, one-night stands trains to nowhere, prayer found in flowers Yet readers could still see her hiding in metaphors Staining his landscapes with the rust of rope burns Words in shards of ash not yet turned to dust An edginess that sharpened his appeal

Jeffrey Brierton

hope is not cancelled Classes are cancelled Starbucks is closed No more Dunkin There’s no coffee for those who need the coffee Coffee doesn’t matter Life is not cancelled Stores are closed Money saved Restaurants are closed Family dinners return Pass the pizza Pizza matters Happy hour is cancelled Sober is better Perspective is not cancelled Can’t visit love ones Can’t hug, can’t shake, can’t kiss FaceTime makes due Zoom makes due Just images On a screen We keep our distance We keep our distance Don’t cry for me, Quarantina Worry is common Love is not cancelled Lives lived day to day We change how we live Every morning Fever check All good All clear No virus here

We make our way Through another day We won’t be broken Grit is not cancelled Firefighters are working Police are working Nurses are working Doctors are working Pharmacists are working Essentials are working Hospitals are full Heroes every one Courage is not cancelled There will be an end to these troubling times We’ll all be stronger The sun still shines The music still rhymes The birds are singing Buds on the trees Flowers pushing up Mother Nature is not cancelled We stay home We stay safe We stay strong We keep the faith We have hope Hope is not cancelled

Lesley Waite horse guy

There was this guy from the mountains he barely showered had a beard didn’t wash his clothes—rugged like his boots he rode to my cabin on a horse The appealing factor was he stared at me from the end of the bar with half a smile and a secret The first night he smelled like pine sap he lived in the woods second night I wondered if it was urine third night he was gone rode his horse somewhere new or I had moved on to the artist from town Horse guy left an impression scuff marks on the foot of my bedsheets something rough in the air

Reed Venrick

the calling sea

Una corriente extraña fluye a través del océano Atlantico, A veces mas fuerte que el viento. (Ponce de Leon, 1513) Under the morning mist of a large tree, A shady mahogany, a grocery parking lot, An island’s only store; here’s where A few old men meet, just as they met Many weekends before going to sea.

Boat that seats just 5—stacked above, A vertical row of rods and reels, pointing Up, lined along the Bimini top. Now, As they load groceries into the boat, Jorge wonders out loud: what fish

Six and seventy plus, with bodies Bent, stiff and slow—one limps, one Bends his head too far to the left. Another holds a hand on his back, as if Releasing pressure of an office chair.

Are running this week? Anybody heard? What’s biting near the 7 mile bridge? As they settle in, and as the pick-up Pulls the boat away—one thinks: Is this fishing trip a Sunday excuse? Look,

All wear baggy Colombia shirts, The cooling cloth hanging free— Pastel colors of hibiscus, peach, powder blue. One slathers on suntan lotion, but another Laughs—dude, it’s too late to worry that.

Just a hundred yards away, there laps The ocean, and beyond, Sombrero Reef, Where we’ll fish three miles out. Now We turn our eyes up when gulls and Pelicans swoop, and buzzards to boot.

Two are guys from up the East coast, One’s retired from UPS, another’s an Ex-teacher of math who bolted after 30. The one with the Panama hat is “Cubano,” Jorge, arrived on a homemade boat when

Someone mumbles: We say we fish, but Don’t we hear words speaking in the waves? Voices in the breakers that sometime calls? Some say all great bodies of water Have voices that call to those on shore,

He was eight. And the one wiping down His sunshades, a “sansei,” ex United Pilot, moved to Islamorada from California After he lost his house in a summer fire. Now, all loading up plantain chips, sardines,

But what voices? Those millions of sailors Who went to sea to never return? Or Those deceptive sirens, who wish to drown Mariners? Or maybe that mermaid sometimes Seen out on Sombrero reef ? Let us pray

Saltines, ice and beer. Lingering, Chatting in the shade of mahogany trees, Waiting for “Capitano Jose”, a little Late, but who finally squeaks up in his old Ford pickup, hauling his 24” Key West

She waits to escort old fishermen when they Leave the outer reefs behind—speeding their boat Toward that hidden river in the ocean that will Sail them home—called the Gulf Stream.

Sue Fulto n

greetings from jekyll island Today I mailed a postcard backwards across 54 years to the knobby kneed 11-year-old I was in 1966: Greetings from Jekyll Island On back, I wrote in blue ink: Relish your virgin bite of Original Recipe KFC, lick the breaded bits off your fingertips without apology. Fill your lungs with briny air, build a castle six-buckets-tall, believe: anything is possible, fairy tales come true, stout hearts tame Dragons. Spend the afternoon swishing white beach sand into sand angels with seashell haloes and sand dollar eyes. In the backseat, on the way home, close your green eyes, remember hot sun on your crown, ocean thigh high, sand coated toes. Savor the only day your mom and dad – on the brink of their ugly divorce forget to fight.

Jim Richardson solve for nothing

Stop staring at your phone as if its a well with a bucket of fresh water lurking in the dark, cause we both know what lurks in the dark. We know its taste. How it eats us from the inside. Yet, I cannot deny that my tongue feels a little dry. I tell you that’s from all the singing although I haven’t let one broken note slip from my lips since you slipped from my hands, which leads to sitting in chairs feeling the gears grind as you see on the floor a piece of plastic once belonging to a larger piece of plastic, but you threw the controller on the floor. You tell yourself that it was out of anger from the game, however, we all know it’s you. You’re the broken piece on the floor chipped from another broken piece so, congratulations, you understand genealogy. See the dust on the table? Why do we have to keep cleaning just to prove we still live here? Shouldn’t that be one of those unstated rules universally agTrue, he replies, as if we are conversing about some historical date that shaped us but have no idea what it’s all about. And what is history but darkness? before you, I thought darkness was where nothing lived. Now, I know its something we spin from our minds like a spider secretes silk. It’s filling the dark with imaginary friends, instead of stumbling hands out. Sweetheart, I don’t care right now if I’m the anchor dragging us further down into the dark, cause your body is my ground and I want my feet to finally feel ground.

Gerald Lenoi r

once again - for george floyd Once Once Once Once

again, again, again, again,

a brother lies dead in the street he screams, “I can’t breathe” with no relief policemen stand idly by while a man in blue condemns a Black man to die.

Once Once Once Once

again, again, again, again,

Black lives really don’t matter a Black body is crushed and shattered Black lives are under attack a man dies because he’s Black

Once Once Once Once

again, again, again, again,

we we we we

pray, we march, we dissent rage, we cry, we vent ask: how can this still be? answer: white supremacy.

America has never paid for its original sin Not for what is or what has always been So, we continue to pay for the color of our skin Not once, but again, and again, and again.

Jessica Cohn

where would we be without blue No opaque blue of vintage apothecary jars, thick with history in the blue light

For me, no memory of the perfect blue suede shoes with spongy soles. I could walk and walk even

of the resale shop. No blue for oceans on the globe that shows terrains instead of nations.

farther in them. I could dance. No dark dry-cleaned suit doing the Dali over the foot of the bed,

Its soft dent in the North Atlantic, so like a newborn’s skull. No cyanotype arts. No Eye of Horus. No

blue veins in the wrists, crook of an arm, breasts, web of organs. No filter for the whir this way.

blue-white stare of a cat’s-eye marble. Clear ice irises of the girl all the boys said had pretty eyes.

Waves of light, showing up short by another name. You could search the back of the eyelids,

All those lines, endless notebook paper, waiting for you to show your work. No blue, the shyest

dome of the sky. All that was thought, a shore of forgetting. We have already lost so much,

shade in rock. And what to call that so-broken feeling? Or new bruise blue.

and not just by falling. Blinded by what is known, and not, the needle in the eye of Newton.

Chakra blue. Blue of rare flowers. Blue in tattoos. Corpse before makeup. Club-filtered smoke.

Alexandra Graffeo the morrigan

Thorns have crawled up her palace walls The Raven Mistress, Lady of Crows Amongst the nettles she watches, She sees red, always. Who is she, this Cloaked Queen, who Steps amongst us, panicked warriors fleeing The maiden, the crone The cauldron beckons, We are marred by devouring madness But when she comes for me I will welcome the blood Her talons draw from my shoulders As she chooses me amongst the corpses And carries me to her palace of brambles Her seeds sprouting in the dust The owl’s screech welcoming me to her twilight halls.

Donna Castañeda puzzles

I start with the most obvious connections Slowly seeing the parts within the panorama of a lifetime I sometimes get frustrated When I can’t find a certain piece The search can last for days I start to wonder—does desire never end? Did the cat, in her Constitutional disregard for my well-being Swipe it off the table again? But I survive the crisis When I find the piece Juxtaposed between clarity (a chair leg) and Chaos (the baseboard) all along I insert it into place With death’s quiet intensity Understanding how fragile life can be When the puzzle is finished I keep it on the table for several days Sipping my hot tea I note its symmetry Run my fingers over its cobblestone smoothness All questions finally answered I am no longer afraid

Lee Beavington

intimate immensity

bits of chromosome and membrane pregnant with nuclear gods a cell in a microscope there lies infinity my hand on my wife’s swollen belly I feel the kick of life when two cells become one a labyrinth of folded nebula layers of lipid and DNA inside my every cell a coiled nest of centipede legs in constant motion each part in touch with every other my son folded in the womb his head on the placental pillow an umbilical cord I quiver to cut welcome to this atomic ocean that flows as an amoeba in love morphs swells stretches into you a spring without shores caged sunlight

I cradle my newborn in his first hour his arms reach out to hold the hand of galaxies I watch the Big Bang throw her chains of light weave particles into comets of creation the Little Bang throws her ribosomes a midwife that delivers the code an egg turned planetary body now my son runs through the grass his tiny body I love more than my own I concede to my vast smallness as we unravel the fluid mosaic the night sky an eclipse my son moves his finger from star to moon to his father’s eye as though he is counting the universe

Ruth Margolin Silin let us talk

To begin with, what I mean to say is, to start At the beginning, or more To the point, to swipe away everything Extemporaneous, that is to say, unnecessary, Or even, more to the point, excessive, then We can have a decidedly serious discussion. The subject is, or possibly can be, if you agree, A topic upon which so much depends, but that Is only the case where everything that matters Less, will be buried with all the other subject Matter that has nothing to do with us, as in the case of plastic vs. paper, climate change, Russia’s interference with democracy. What fables did we base our dreams upon? The one where Jack and his bean stalk beat the giant at his game? Where the wicked witch gets her just deserts? But even Sampson was brought down. Remember when we were young and pitifully naïve, outrage overtook our senses, our energies wasted on worthy causes. We marched, held placards with clever slogans, wrote letters, demanded to be heard, deluded ourselves that we could make a difference. Ah, my friend, my foolish self, let us not waste another minute. Let us fly to that island in the Pacific that we once sailed past, not a human in sight, banana trees, soft waves. morning songs of birds, fish waiting for our catch. Not a ship in sight to stop for our return. Let us talk.

Donna Beumler phoenix children

They learn young That you never really know a slap until it takes you by surprise That comfort flails like a ragged sheet hung out on a windy day While hope hides behind his mother’s shaking legs Profanity she shouldn’t know and doesn’t want Is caught at the back of her throat, stopping even the good words from coming They perch precariously atop carousel ponies And reach longingly for brass rings which are not there and never will be She is knocked down by waves in a callous sea, The neighbors closing their windows so as to not hear the crash they surely know is coming Years scar their hearts And every day is a new opportunity to lack courage Still, he eventually manages to mend most of the damage One lonely stitch at a time, despite the blood on his fingertips And she teaches herself when to scream And when not to, though the lessons often take her breath away They suffer through sleepless dreams of flaming pyres Just so they have an idea what joy might feel like In the end, they may not rise very well or very far But the effort is a thing of glory Together they march on like old soldiers Shrugging off their sorrow, they turn their faces to a sun hidden by clouds

Sheila Perelman star bright

In the box is a forest of tiny trees, like church spires reaching for heaven, a multitude of branches, like lungs sustaining life, little rivers of breath... in, out...again and again, into eternal space where there may be light years of tiny stars, shining brightly, twinkling messages to the forest of tiny trees.

Karen Petersen

vacation in wales, after the war It was all glowing pink, purple and green on the small hills above the house today, the heather and gorse almost on fire with their fierce, wind-spangled colors. Geese overhead at dawn, charms of goldfinches in the privet, the far summits standing clear. We had a fast sunlit race across the moors, cloud-shadows flowing over the fells, swallows hunting low through the flower meadows. And as I ran across the old chalk finish line behind my brother, no longer small but all grown now, a man in full, I stumbled and he gathered me up, safe and unhurt, as if I was still a young girl. To be surrounded by family and unfettered landscape today was a kind of bountiful perfection, and gave some peace amid the clattering and hammering of my troubled dreams, hiding away in a far-off place.

Drew Ridley-Siegert roadkill

The old man travelled Gravel roads, once Lovers like roadkill Littered the verges. In search of... Something, Some unoriginal sin. Forgotten now, “He is of a certain age,” they say. Of course they would, What do they know of Time? Hourglass figure collapsing as the sands fall As gravity calls. Remembering is fruitful,

Peeled , halve d, scoo Pomeg ped ou ranate t, s e e d Erotic s of experi ences Finger s slick with ju Pickin ice g over Memo Pithy r y’s skeleto n. Lacun ae, can als Each d ecision ’s Fracta l bran ches Reach ing, Dendr ites m ating Interd igitati n g Despe rate to c o nnect Now a nd the n . Can he pass b y som Avoid e? memo ries

Deborah Marshall first kiss

I lied all my life, claimed it was from Charlie in the Rambler’s back

my shoulders roughly against the lone tree, an oak dangling a tire swing.

on a double date with his sister and fat beau post Bonnie and Clyde.

He kissed me hard. My head crushed between the trunk and his thick, wet lips.

I, sophomore, fifteen; he, a Boston Tech junior. No Warren Beatty

My mother shouted, “John McGowan, come here now.” He let go, ran off.

was Charlie. Truly, more like Michael J. Pollard. Not at all special.

I wiped his spit off my mouth, brushed bark bits from my gingham blouse.

I was six years old. Johnny McGowan, thirteen, had trapped me, pinned

Later, she’d asked, “Why did you let him do that?” I couldn’t answer.

Chris White flawed heroes

Grandma’s 98 pounds of sparkle also yielded the brassiness needed to defy the Bakersville police and the rules of the road— she’ll turn wherever she wants. Grandpa radiated serenity, puffing on a sticky Chesterfield as he reached in to save an unborn lamb with a gentle, Vaseline-coated arm. But he never could stand up to her— or the nicotine. Light and dark dwell inside both, merging to gray, as legacies pant and wane under the weight of imperfections.

Cheryl Cook

love poem for my small son & grandmother passed on a) you sleep with your head on my foot bum high in the air. my mum says that one of us (me or my brothers?) used to chirp in our sleep like a small bird can’t imagine how a life so consuming as this fades into such fragile memories just barely brushing by present existence I try so hard daily to commit to memory your sweet breath against my neck you have no idea we are not one b) one day when you are a man you will watch me grow old and suddenly how I breathe will seem precious and rare you will hold my hand as it grows smaller until there is nothing left of me but dust c) when my grandmother was dying it seemed to me that her hands were wrens so delicate and small, fragile as teacups.

she slept like a newborn 19 hours a day shrinking until all I wanted to do was cradle her in my arms skin papery and thin mine was tearing red hot stripes down my belly and back again while you (my son) made your presence increasingly known she cast on a row of perfect tiny white purls intending to make you a sweater d) I never see you sleeping anymore you tower above me my belly scars white and faded I think of you in blurs hazy glimpses of smallness some memory behind a curtain with the sunlight streaming through my vision just obscured but I can still catch the feeling e) I send my mother whose hands recently reminded me of wrens photos of my poppies blooming coral

Peggy Rosabal

he prospered

It was a tender mess he was born into. His mother sang, baby, then new baby at her breast. The land so hard that it begrudged a harvest, but they made due with seed cake, and old stories. And then the change; he saw his father harden like the land, hauling turf near midnight. His mother said at least he wouldn’t bring the anger to the house. Nonetheless they sheltered all together. He went to school already tired and filthy from the farm. The priest would ask him if he’d had his breakfast like an accusation, a confirmation of his lesser standing and wouldn’t give him bread. He learned the lesson early, of his worth.

Instead he grew up softly, learned to birthe the lambs, see the land through their crusted eyes, watch the last lick of gold at sunset, breathe in the first wild roses curling round the fences. The smell would almost drop him with a joy he couldn’t bear. It wasn’t a decision when he left, more a wanting, a voyage to a place where things were better. So he took it, grasped at it worked and built, loved without condition or damnation, had children hand in hand around his table. When he returned it was to bury Father, who’s atonement was uncertain. His Mother in her chair, not clear about him, calling out his brother’s name. The day was full of rain, and wanting to get over. At the gate as he was leaving, the priest said “I see you’ve prospered.” He felt it like a slap.

JJ Roger s cocytus

The river flows brine, warm— banks sloped, steep— slick with regret. Youth ignore it. For them, life runs faster than the woeful stream. But journeys never end the way they were planned. People trip; people fall. When traversing the water, travelers—baptized with remorse— drink their mistakes, losses. They cup their hands, sip ruination, and wait.

Jon Womack covid 19

there’s a heaviness in my heart that mangles my insides with this dreadful isolationism I haven’t had a drop to drink though god knows I need one this virus multiplying in the core of my cells while I remain ignorant of its invasion of bones and organs spreading it to the unsuspecting ones who’ll surrender fully to its power while these roots grind me into a depression so deep that no light can escape my soul as it departs this transient life I’ve taken so much for granted as of late the earth once again percolating a fresh promise of pestilence so as to strengthen the genome while I surrender these memories and these elements back to the soil and air of another day filled with probabilities

Tess Cooper

honey comb

Teeth slicing through comb, Honey dripping from my lips and staining my white blouse They say don’t bother the bees and they won’t bother you But I am a queen and they swarm to me Gold jewelry in my ears and rings upon fingers I bring roses and wine but do not drink It is a sacrifice and I am the priestess, keeper of the bees

Megan Wildhood

i wish human destruction were the exuberantly rotting nurse logs all along the trail of the last hike I took my antsy rescue dogs on before the season closed. I left my little girls with their fevers at their father’s. I packed for what I knew. I skirt a face-down river, flail as the marionettier of my pack, dread that I wasn’t born a hundred years ago, farther from the end of the world. I listen for the names of things. The cold sizzles. Branches, bowed as if laden with snow, weaken with their own growing weight. How do I teach my girls about snow, which dark isn’t scary, what to do with wishes and love, that the real fairy tale is when no one needs saving. I excel at walks on the beach. We are in a woods. We are in a woods because humans aren’t working. Human relationships aren’t working. I needed to be loved by someone who has failed; that’s not (yet) birds, gales, soil. I hit dirt with my knees; my dogs look crazy at me. Cups of earth in my hands, dirt on my dogs’ tongues. I hold their faces, kiss them sorry, sorry. I’m so sorry.

Ron Lauderbach

it must have been one big ass bird It’s a mystery what kind of bird knocked power out in eastern San Diego last November. Freezers thawed and phones died. People had to talk to and look each other in the eye. With no traffic lights there were car crashes until drivers relearned to take turns. Baseball stopped and football started. The stock market celebrated more death in the Middle East. There was a solar eclipse and three more people signed up to be President. After dark there was looting all over and tags lit up with headlights and flashlights. Boundaries changed and one guy died. Look for a birth spike in August.

David Campbell buteo 2

The City Twelve feet of horizontal air from me on the bridge to talons clutching a streetlight’s upper lid. Size was my security had my stare been met. He aimed straight down to weedy cracks between bridge pier and pavement where a mouse would show. Competing with traps set by the fence where trash trucks got packed in at night like children’s blocks in a chest. He dove, but swooped up alone, reperched on a truck’s compactor body, a figurehead on a fellow scavenger, both empty for now.

Jeff Abell

on the flight path to o’hare Every night at dusk, we can see them, the new constellations, approaching from the east. These unfixed stars, how quickly they come, and quickly change, reconfiguring neither deity or beast, not spirit animals or icons, but something strange and fleeting, lasting not a month, but a moment. Our ancient ancestors watched the skies for signs of when to plant the wheat or corn, and the return of the Virgin and the Scales told them it was time to harvest. Children born under those stars would be bankers or spies or great lovers. These new configurations of lights in the night sky signal only change, lives in transition, the end of the great Nations that watched the skies in search of answers, waiting for Father to come home, or his Son to arrive.

Cliff Saunders

confessions of a goner My whole life is coming to an end,

of engine failure and making

and a longing for spontaneity

helmets cool under sofa pillows.

eludes me as nights get colder

I make snow dust the field

and stones burn me to make them

where the dying is just beginning.

more normal. I’m dying while

Hoping for the best, I make fish

waiting for seas to be born.

bounce on pedestals, churches

Please, I’m terrified for my life

bounce with a single member.

right now. I’m a goner with

I live life informed by jagged edges.

binoculars at the ready, but now

It looks like I cannot be free

I see stargazers in Africa, I see

without getting elbowed by

ports in jeopardy and grass

chatty office workers. What fills

summer-red. I’d love to one day

the world has changed from

see winter gardens filled with

vermilion to sizzling star.

red wolf puppies, but now I need

Out of the broom closet, death

to sing my story of aftershocks

brings me a past that never

to the next level. Right now,

happened, a peaceful passing

I’m just living on the edge

into its twilight of healing.

Caro l Mikoda promise

Magnolia’s buds promise stellar spring blossoms after winter’s end. I can’t promise to save the world and solve its problems. My internet connection is weak; it takes too long to download the software. I can’t promise to ward off evil. Spells and herbs are nice but too thin a veil of protection: bad stuff will come from people in bad places, or from unseen consequences of whatever we once thought good. And I can’t see the future well enough to prepare us for any emergency. Some are so emergent that we haven’t yet invented the technology that will cause them. I can only promise to notice when a single leaf detaches and circles upward, to listen to owls’ nighttime signals, to smell chemistry between oak and fungus, to imagine and create, with magnolias as my muse, ways to share sweetness, ways to live when changes come but we resist.

Carol Mikoda

today is a good day

Today I will count the anemones and multiply by six or eight to know exactly how many petals hold their faces to the fading light as the cold, that nightly thief, steals long summer days. When I know the number, I can be secure, awakened from my ignorant slumber. I will also know that today is a good day to speak truth and let go of the outcome, let go of the worry: let those fall away like myriad locust leaves that drift and pile in corners against goldenrod fences until the dominion of yellow cannot be denied.

Carol Mikoda a natural way

The waning moon still high in the sky, I wake and slip outside. The schedule urges me to walk on water, so I sink down into the cold. Listening for salt, I hear sturgeon in discussion with largemouth bass as I rise back up. The moon sets; waves slip over my head but I have prepared: turn head, breathe in; face down, breathe out. My mind’s rhythmic music, like hollow shafted fur, helps me float. Miles and miles I swim across the windless silver sheen that skates between shores. On my back, I gaze up at the Milky Way stretched taut, its stars scattered as unraked leaves snagged on night sky’s blanket. Things go on in a natural way.

Margaret Sullivan

driving questions in the landscape Driving questions were positioned in the landscape

Someone she once knew

of her youth and her training

was just standing and waiting

They offered themselves in the form of male voices

as she whizzed by in her car

In a click of her story, she recalled them

She thought of the edge around their words

There were many questions

and the parts of their words that were made into flesh

for which she had responsible answers

She said, “There he is.

There were many symbols representing

I know him.

her daily life

I wonder if I

She established a pattern of ritual

will ever see him again”

Beckoning as prayer

The question itself seemed to pull her away

Far easier to remember

It held the sound of a sponge being pulled apart under the water

In adolescence the questions changed At what altar did she sacrifice? Arranging objects on surfaces Became a special interest

a weed being ripped out in one unit loose hair in the brush gathered up and pulled away

Jeff Abell of Chicago, Illinois is an interdisciplinary artist, educator, critic and performance artist with a background in Music Composition.

Franklin Agogho of Cameroon writes poetry, short stories and comic book scripts. He is published in the anthology “Crossroads of Dreams”.

Lisa Ashley of Bainbridge Island, Washington is a poet

and spiritual director who works with incarcerated youth. Her work is informed by her Armenian ancestry and her life in the Pacific Northwest.

Lee Beavington of Mayne Island, British Columbia

is a candidate for a Ph.D. in Philosophy of Education at Simon Frasier University. His studies are centered in environmental ethics.

Donna Beumler of Hawi, Hawaii is the author of the

legal thriller Criminal/Lawyer. Her poetry will appear in the inaugural edition of Latitude, the on-line literary journal of The Writers Guild.

Alexander Blackie of Devon, England is a university

lecturer, visual artist and a poet. His poem about Francisco Goya was the Journal’s Editors’ Choice Award.

Jeffrey Brierton of Gurnee, Illinois is a professor of political science and history at National Louis U.

David Campbell of Somerville, Masschusetts is a plain air landscape painter whose poetry is informed by his interest in mythology and animals. He has been writing poetry for more than sixty years.

Sydney Cardew is a poet and artist who lives on the

Isle of Wight. Her work addresses nature, transcience and her experience as a transgender woman living in a rural and isolated setting.

Donna Castañeda of Imperial, California will be

starting an MFA at Antioch University, Los Angeles. She is a retired professor, and a member of the everreaching Newfoundland diaspora.

Ritika Chand-Bergfeld of Webster Groves,

Cheryl Cook of Salmo, British Columbia is an herbalist and author of the forthcoming chapbook, Phytography.

Tess Cooper of Bloomfield Hills, Michigan in her

words, “creates beauty from pain and historically, is eager for a fistfight”.

the prairies of North Dakota and around the lakes of Minnesota. She holds a degree from UCLA where she has worked as an editor.

Anupriya Kumari of West Bengal, India is sixteen

Celine Coschizza is an environmental scientist who lives on Salt Spring Island in British Columbia.

years old. She began in the memoir genre as a nineyear old, and is planning to make her poem here a title for her forthcoming poetry collection.

Steven Dale Davison of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Ron Lauderbach is a retired teacher who lives

is a poet, playwright, fiction writer and essayist. He was awarded a writing scholarship from the Earlham School of Religion.

Yvonne-Nicole de St. Croix of Southbury,

Connecticut is a doctor of transformational educational leadership. She is an active member of the Academy of American Poets.

Lee Dunn is from Toronto, Ontario. His areas of

interest have a wide range—from surreal to horrific to nostalgic. His work has appeared in Spillwords.com and Crepe and Penn.

Fletcher Fitzgibbon of Winlaw, British Columbia

between San Diego and Provence. He holds an MFA from San Diego State University.

Matthew Lee of Houston, Texas is a poet, a violinist and a physician.

Gerald Lenoir is a Strategy Analyst at the

Othering and Belonging Institute at the University of Califor nia, Berkeley. He was a founding director of the Black Alliance for Just Immigration.

Kerrie Lindo is a poet who lives on the coast of Scotland.

Morgan Liphart of Lakewood, Colorado is a

is a poetry, fiction and non-fiction writer in the Sinixt Territory. He will be releasing his chapbook, A Field Guide to Dream Data, soon.

lawyer whose work reflects on current social issues and moving from the plains to the mountains west.

Beth Ford of Staunton, Virginia is a poet and novelist

poetry editor for the magazine LILIPOH. She has published fourteen chapbooks and has won numerous poetry national book competitions.

living in the Shenandoah Valley.

Sue Fulton of Phoenix, Arizona hosts the writers

Ellaraine Lockie of Sunnyvale, Califor nia is

group Shut Up and Write, as well as Inkwell, a local writers workshop. She is published in flash memoir, children’s stories, and other arenas.

Mark MacAllister of Pittsboro, North Carolina

Alexandra Graffeo of Staten Island, New York

Robert McBrearty of Louisville, Colorado is a

studied at Oberlin College. His work is informed, in part by life on a Wisconsin dairy farm.

holds a Master’s degree in Fantasy Literature from the University of Glasgow and is inspired by the magic in everyday life.

Pushcart Prize author who has published five books of fiction.

Katja Juscha Grunther is a poet.

the helping professions in service to the homeless. While he is widely published in several prose forms, this was his first poetry submission.

Susan Johnson of South Hadley, Massachusetts

Missouri is a poet who caress for her home and three children. She is often found “playing with the words singing in her head”.

teaches writing at the University of Massachusetts where she holds an MFA and a doctorate. Her poetry has appeared in “North American Review”, “San Pedro River Review” and others.

Jessica Cohn is a reporter based on the Central

Robert Keim of Wolcott, New York was featured in

Coast of California. She is widely published in poetry journals, notably, in Rattle.

Kay Krattli of Carmel, Califor nia was raised on

Writer’s Digest Magazine for his invented poetic form, The Blitz Poem. He is an educator in Upstate New York.

Hugh McGillvray of British Columbia works in

Deborah Marshall of Wayland, Massachusetts is

a visual artist and a retired art therapist. Her poems have been published in What Rough Beast, and others.

Mallory Meeks studies electrical engineering at the Colorado School of Mines. Her passions: writing late into the night, reading Gillian Flynn novels.

Carol Mikoda of Hector, New York is a poet, a singer,

Margaret Sullivan of Salt Spring Island, British

a guitarist, a photographer of things aquatic--clouds and water, and things arboreal. She is a walker in the woods, a traveler, a retired teacher.

Columbia and Chicago, Illinois is the co-founder and editor in chief of The Journal of Undiscovered Poets. She is a professor of Consumer Psychology.

Charles Patton of Orlando, Florida is a published

Gina Tranisi of Omaha, Nebraska works with the

writer in biography, mystery, fiction, non-fiction, children’s books, and his poetry collection, Musings of a Wise Man.

youth poetry festival, Louder Than a Bomb Great Plains. She was an instructor with the Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program.

Sheila Perelman of Hastings-on-Hudson, New York

Gene Twaronite is the author of ten books,

is retired from the helping professions in mental health. She is a poet and a collage artist.

Eric Noel Perez of Bayshore, New York is an English teacher, an ordained minister, a motivational speaker, a yoga instructor and the author of three books.

Karen Petersen of Santa Fe, New Mexico was the

first to receive five Pushcart nominations in poetry, short story and flash. Her poems have been translated into Persian and Spanish.

Ellise Ramos of Toronto, Ontario is in the helping profession assisting persons with mental illness. She facilitates a writing workshop for The Toronto Writers Collective.

Jim Richardson is a writer living in Lake Butler, Florida

Drew Ridley-Siegert is a poet living in Wales. He specializes in haiku and is a painter and wood carver.

JJ Rogers of Irvine, Kentucky is a widely published

poet and writer. Presently, he is engaged in a poetry book and music compilation that blends poetry and song writing with varying musical styles.

Peggy Rosabal is a poet living in Ridgefield, Connecticut.

Leah Ryder of Victoria, British Columbia is a poet and

novelist. She publishes Write/Werk, a monthly newsletter that features interviews with women in marketing.

Ruth Margolin Silin is a poet living in Auburndale, Massachusetts She enjoys contemplating the past, the present and the future of hope.

Cliff Saunders of Myrtle Beach, South Carolina holds an MFA in Creative Writing from The University of Arizona. His poems have appeared in Monterey Review, Phantom Drift, Common Ground Review, and others.

including juvenile fantasy novels, essay collections, short stories, poems and a forthcoming picture book. His book Trash Picker on Mars won the 2017 New Mexico-Arizona Book Award for Arizona poetry.

Jean Varda of Chico, California is a the founder of

Sacred Feather Press, and a Pushcart nominee. She has published six poetry chapbooks and established four open mic readings.

Reed Venrick is a poet who lives in s i x cou n tri e s, combi ni ng hi s passi ons f o r l a n g u a g e a n d t r ave l . P r e s e n t ly h e i s spending his time in Medellin, Colombia.

Lesley Waite of Nyack,NewYork has studied at UMASS, NYU, Sarah Lawrence, The New School and Smith College. She performs readings in cafes and libraries throughout New York.

Devin West is a writer living in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Chris White specializes in the

study of leadership. Dr. White is a statistician whose poetry is informed by his love of Nature and family.

Megan Wildhood of Seattle,

Washington is an erinaceous, neodiverse student of social work who strives to help her readers “feel genuinely seen”. Find her work in “The Atlantic”, “The Sun”, and her chapbook “ Long D i vi si on” , Fi ni shi ng Li ne Press.

Jon Womack of Monroe, Michigan discovered poetry in his retirement years. The Journal is proud to have discovered his work.

Our poets around the world California - 7, New York - 6, Illinois - 4, Massachusetts - 4, Colorado - 3

The United States - 44 British Columbia - 7, Ontario - 2

Canada - 9 Cameroon, Colombia, England, France, India, Scotland, Wales

www. u n d i s c o v e r e d p o e t s .com

The Journal of Undiscovered Poets is a labour of love, a purely charitable offering. no humans involved receive any compensation…in this life. Any sale of books, journals or donations go directly to Island Wildlife rescue on Salt Spring island, bc to help support their activities rescuing injured and orphaned wildlife. If we can help prevent the needless suffering of a single animal, then we have done important work. All Journal content Copyright © 2021, 7moredays publishing and its contributors. 7moredays

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heartfelt thanks to the w. garfield weston foundation & pilar bauta for the generous grant that set this Journal on its path. also thank you to diana hayes and to Contour Graphics for printing.

Jeff Abell Lisa Ashley Franklin Agogho Lee Beavington Donna Beumier Alexander Blackie Jeffrey Brierton David Campbell Sydney Cardew Donna Castañeda Ritika Chand-Bergeld Jessica Cohn Tess Cooper Celine Coschizza Cheryl Cook Steven Dale Davison Lee Duhn Fletcher Fitzgibbon Beth Ford Sue Fulton Robert Garner McBreary Alexandra Graffeo Katja Juscha Grunther Susan Johnson Gina Keplinger Kay Kratili Robert Kelm Anupriya Kumari Ron Lauderbach Matthew Lee George Lenoir Kerrie Lindo Morgan Liphart Ellaraine Locke Yvonne Nicole Maisel de St. Crois Mark MacAllister Hugh McGillvray Ruth Margolin Silin Deborah Marshall Mallory Meeks Carol Mikoda Charles Patton Shiela Perelman Eric Noel Perez Karen Petersen Ellise Ramos Jim Richardson Drew Ridley-Siegart J J Rogers Peggy Rosabal Leah Ryder Cliff Saunders Margaret Sullivan Gene Twaronite Jean Varda Reed Venrick Lesley Waite Devin West Chris White Megan Wildhood Jon Womack Jeff Abell Lisa Ashley Franklin Agogho Lee Beavington Donna Beumier Alexander Blackie Jeffrey Brierton David Campbell Sydney Cardew Donna Castaneda Ritika Chand-Bergeld Jessica Cohn Tess Cooper Celine Coschizza Cheryl Cook Steven Dale Davison Lee Duhn Fletcher Fitzgibbon Beth Ford Sue Fulton Robert Garner McBreary Alexandra Graffeo Katja Juscha Grunther Susan Johnson Gina Keplinger Kay Kratili Robert Kelm Anupriya Kumari Ron Lauderbach Matthew Lee George Lenoir Kerrie Lindo Morgan Liphart Ellaraine Locke Yvonne Nicole Maisel de St. Crois Mark McAllister Hugh McGillvray Ruth Margolin Silin Deborah Marshall Mallory Meeks Charles Patton Shiela Perelman Eric Noel Perez Karen Petersen Elise Ramos Jim Richardson Drew Ridley-Siegart J J Rogers Peggy Rosabal Leah Ryder Cliff Saunders Margaret Sullivan Gene Twaronite Jean Varda Reed Venrick Lesley Waite Devin West Chris White Megan Wildwood Jon Womack Jeff Abell Lisa Ashley Franklin Agogho Lee Beavington Donna Beumier Alexander Blackie Jeffrey Brierton David Campbell Sydney Cardew Donna Castaneda Ritika Chand-Bergeld Jessica Cohn Tess Cooper Celine Coschizza Cheryl Cook Steven Dale Davison Lee Duhn Fletcher Fitzgibbon Beth Ford Sue Fulton Robert Garner McBreary Alexandra Graffeo Katja Juscha Grunther Susan Johnson Gina Keplinger Kay Kratili Robert Kelm Anupriya Kumari Ron Lauderbach Matthew Lee George Lenoir Kerrie Lindo Morgan Liphart Ellaraine Locke Yvonne Nicole Maisel de St. Crois Mark McAllister Hugh McGillvray Ruth Margolin Silin Deborah Marshall Mallory Meeks Charles Patton Shiela Perelman Eric Noel Perez Karen Petersen Elise Ramos Jim Richardson Drew RidleySiegart J J Rogers Peggy Rosabal Leah Ryder Cliff Saunders Margaret Sullivan Gene Twaronite Jean Varda Reed Venrick Lesley Waite Devin West Chris White Megan Wildwood Jon Womack Jeff Abell Lisa Ashley Franklin Agogho Lee Beavington Donna Beumier Alexander Blackie Jeffrey Brierton David Campbell Sydney Cardew Donna Castañeda Ritika Chand-Bergeld Jessica Cohn Tess Cooper Celine Coschizza Cheryl Cook Steven Dale Davison Lee Duhn Fletcher Fitzgibbon Beth Ford Sue Fulton Robert Garner McBreary Alexandra Graffeo Katja Juscha Grunther Susan Johnson Gina Keplinger Kay Kratili Robert Kelm Anupriya Kumari Ron Lauderbach Matthew Lee George Lenoir Kerrie Lindo Morgan Liphart Ellaraine Locke Yvonne Nicole Maisel de St. Crois Mark MacAllister Hugh McGillvray Ruth Margolin Silin Deborah Marshall Mallory Meeks Carol Mikoda Charles Patton Shiela Perelman Eric Noel Perez Karen Petersen Ellise Ramos Jim Richardson Drew Ridley-Siegart J J Rogers Peggy Rosabal Leah Ryder Cliff Saunders Margaret Sullivan Gene Twaronite Jean Varda Reed Venrick Lesley Waite Devin West Chris White Megan Wildhood Jon Womack Jeff Abell Lisa Ashley Franklin Agogho Lee Beavington Donna Beumier Alexander Blackie Jeffrey Brierton David Campbell Sydney Cardew Donna Castañeda Ritika Chand-Bergeld Jessica Cohn Tess Cooper Celine Coschizza Cheryl Cook Steven Dale Davison Lee Duhn Fletcher Fitzgibbon Beth Ford Sue Fulton Robert Garner McBreary Alexandra Graffeo Katja Juscha Grunther Susan Johnson Gina Keplinger Kay Kratili Robert Kelm Anupriya Kumari Ron Lauderbach Matthew Lee George Lenoir Kerrie Lindo Morgan Liphart Ellaraine Locke Yvonne Nicole Maisel de St. Crois Mark McAllister Hugh McGillvray Ruth Margolin Silin Deborah Marshall Mallory Meeks Carol Mikoda Charles Patton Shiela Perelman Eric Noel Perez Karen Petersen Ellise Ramos Jim Richardson Drew Ridley-Siegart J J Rogers Peggy Rosabal Leah Ryder Cliff Saunders Margaret Sullivan Gene Twaronite Jean Varda Reed Venrick Lesley Waite Devin West