Tipton Poetry Journal #39

Tipton Poetry Journal – Fall 2018

Tipton Poetry Journal – Fall 2018

Tipton Poetry Journal Editor’s Note

Tipton Poetry Journal, located in the heartland of the Midwest, publishes quality poetry from Indiana and around the world.

This issue features 38 poets from the United States (15 different states and Puerto Rico) and 2 poets who live in Canada and Ireland.

Cover Photo: “Winding alley in fall” by Alexey Stiop, https://stock.adobe.com/images/winding-alley-in-fall/33872120 Print versions of Tipton Poetry Journal are available for purchase through amazon.com.

Barry Harris, Editor Natalie McCann, Assistant Editor

Copyright 2018 by the Tipton Poetry Journal.

All rights remain the exclusive property of the individual contributors and may not be used without their permission.

Tipton Poetry Journal is published by Brick Street Poetry Inc., a tax-exempt non-profit organization under IRS Code 501(c)(3).

Brick Street Poetry Inc. publishes the Tipton Poetry Journal, hosts the monthly poetry series Poetry on Brick Street and sponsors other poetry-related events.

Tipton Poetry Journal – Fall 2018

Contents Deborah Walker .............................................................................. 1 Michael Keshigian ........................................................................... 2 Marianne Lyon ................................................................................. 4 Norma Sadler .................................................................................... 7 Dorsía Smith Silva ........................................................................... 8 C.W. Owens ..................................................................................... 10 Rosemary Freedman ................................................................... 10 Gil Arzola ......................................................................................... 12 Thomas Piekarski ........................................................................ 12 Thomas O’Dore .............................................................................. 14 Tony Gloeggler .............................................................................. 15 Charles Grosel ............................................................................... 18 Thom Young ................................................................................... 19 Mary Redman ................................................................................ 20 Miles Varana .................................................................................. 21 Elton Glaser .................................................................................... 24 Jessica Nguyen ............................................................................... 26 Kyle Hunter .................................................................................... 26 Keith Dunlap .................................................................................. 28 Vinny Corsaro ................................................................................ 29 John L. Stanizzi .............................................................................. 30 Laura Johnson ............................................................................... 31 DS Maolalaí .................................................................................... 32 David Craig ..................................................................................... 34

Tipton Poetry Journal – Fall 2018 Judy Young ...................................................................................... 36 Mary Hills Kuck ............................................................................. 38 James K. Zimmerman .................................................................. 40 Roger Pfingston ............................................................................ 42 Joan Colby ....................................................................................... 43 Claire Keyes .................................................................................... 44 Alarie Tennille ............................................................................... 46 Changming Yuan .......................................................................... 47 Timothy Robbins .......................................................................... 48 Tom Raithel .................................................................................... 50 Kimberly Prijatel .......................................................................... 50 Dick Bentley ................................................................................... 52 Lisa Eve Cheby ............................................................................... 53 Jeanine Stevens ............................................................................. 56 George Freek .................................................................................. 57 Jill Evans .......................................................................................... 58 Contributor Biographies ................................................... 62

Tipton Poetry Journal – Fall 2018

Tipton Poetry Journal – Fall 2018

Let Autumn Come Deborah Walker After Jane Kenyon’s “Let Evening Come”

Let sunlight slip from overhead and slant toward afternoon.

Let evening cool more quickly than before, and morning warm more slowly. Let what blooms move from pink to russet, from lemon to deepest gold, from baby blue to aster-purple.

Let leaves abandon green for warmer hues.

Let breezes grow cool, rains grow chill, sleeves grow long. Let thoughts turn once more toward the woodstove and second quilts appear on beds.

Let nights grow longer at the expense of days.

Let autumn come, as it must; be not afraid. No season has the final word, but takes its turn.

Deborah Walker began writing poetry in 2012 after she and her husband moved from the city to a log cabin on sixty acres.

She is a member of the Ohio Poetry Association and her work has also appeared in its annual journal Common Threads.

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Fall 2018

Thief Michael Keshigian Two days ago the sun caught me stealing light to illuminate a poem, demanded restitution, then reported me to Mother Nature who posted my likeness about the land.

Soon, the ocean, forest, birds, flowers, et. al. filed suit for substantial abuse and complacent philandering without permission.

I pleaded guilty; admitted taking breath from wind for deliverance, marshmallows from the sky to sweeten song, and rage from the ocean to instill a sense of urgency.

Convicted and confined to a windowless room, no writing, visitation or glimpses of stolen sights, I was sentenced to imagine beauty without embezzlement and the wholesale exploitation of words.

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Fall 2018

Married Life

Michael Keshigian

Noise to his silence, light to his darkness she walks through his brain singing and spins melodies in his head.

He hears her small breathing when she hides in closets with no handles and surprises him in the shower, her body all soapy.

She slips in and out of beautiful yet he sees her just the same and sometimes wonders how she arrived and what her mission might be.

The years sneak by like mice across the field, yet she remains as unexplainable as her underwear hanging on the line in his basement workshop.

Michael Keshigian from New Hampshire, has been published in numerous national and international journals, recently including Aji, Red River Review, Passager Journal, Blue Pepper, Young Ravens Literary Review and has appeared as feature writer in over a twenty publications with 6 Pushcart Prize and 2 Best Of The Net nominations. (michaelkeshigian.com)

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Fall 2018

Hosanna Marianne Lyon Begin to notice a braid of women like a to-do list trudging to village water spigot yellow plastic containers balance on turbaned heads I follow them into their deep story Begin to observe hollow stares like burnt-out fires eyes meet not others crumpled faces glares cling to far horizon Begin to consider what is crowded out of them Is every-day pilgrimage to promised-land’s rusted pipe all their thoughts can hold?

Begin to swallow my pompous acumens accusing their poverty philosophizing that suffering is one valid means that can put us in touch Who am I to judge?

Begin to hear what they do not say when breeze carries her soft humming to baby hung on back and ahead avid kid bounces smile-face unbridled spoon rattles tin-cup-drum

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Fall 2018

Begin to understand tap-a-tap-tap, tap-a-tap-tapping doesn’t add despair to her ledger before, dog-tired shuffling now her stride sighs, matches cup’s syncopated language that metallic music could be courageous salve for her bleeding wounds.

But, who am I to judge?

.

Braided Together Marianne Lyon

We have lost our taste for miracles— savory wind touched in mountain creek.

You sneer, bid me feast on tragedy, betrayal.

What of honey from sinking sun filling sky bowl?

You remind of leaf-fall season when hard frost bites off buds.

You write of nights crisped by chill, anger embers inside of you I don’t know how it happens but you smirk me inside your heart I lick your dread— a terrible rain of sorrow I fill my mouth with holy words— they bring no comfort

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Fall 2018 I begin to taste salt— my tears stammer out your unwelcome memories your forever weepings wail from your full-of-grief reservoir I stay inside of you for a painful moment more, begin to wonder if I can braid together our two tales— so much at odds when my feet begin to follow mountain creek my cheeks still wet— hot with your hopelessness and spicy wind rushes at my query undulates in fragrant air unanswered

Marianne Lyon has been a music teacher for 43 years.

After teaching in Hong Kong, she returned to the Napa Valley and has been published in various literary magazines and reviews including Ravens Perch, TWJM Magazine, Earth Daughters, Tipton poetry Journal and Indiana Voice Journal. She was nominated for the Pushcart prize in 2017. She is a member of the California Writers Club and an Adjunct Professor at Touro University in California.

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Fall 2018

Noctis Equi Norma Sadler Run slowly, horses of the night.

Pass by on another road, I am traveling this way alone.

It is an easy time, this time.

I have no bones to break, They are broken.

It is an easy time, this time.

I have no heart to mend, It is torn apart.

I have no bones to break, No heart to mend, I am traveling this way alone.

Horses, pass by.

Leave me be.

Another time, a harder time, Come for me.

Norma Sadler has published essays, poetry, or short stories in St. Andrews Review, Chanteh: the Iranian Cross Cultural Quarterly,the cold drill, Pembroke Quarterly, NCTE Journal, Tipton Poetry Journal, Japanophile, Wanderings, and online at Cyberoasis, Moondance, Mused Bella-on-line, Verse-Virtual, Green Silk Journal, and others. Her blog is nsnetnov.blogspot.com, where her paintings appear with her written works. She has two novels on Amazon Kindle.

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Fall 2018

Still Life Dorsía Smith Silva Here I am again: I retell the story all at once to the thin-faced doctor on duty: The blood came when it shouldn’t have.

At first, it was pink then brown and later bright red.

How far along are you?

5 weeks and 5 days.

How can you be sure?

I went to the doctor a few days ago.

I’m sure because: I had unpacked the saved striped onesies.

I had whispered into the baby books that this time would be different.

I had imagined the tiny fingers pressed into mine.

I had started thinking of baby names: David for a boy, maybe Gabriela for a girl.

I had planned the baby shower that would not come.

You’re young. You can try again.

Oh yes, I’m supposed to have good eggs and a perfect uterus, so then why is there a void in my body? How do you explain this empty space of cells?

Sometimes, it’s the body’s way of cleaning itself...like getting rid of what is not supposed to be there.

I wonder where did my child go; the ultrasound is porcelain clean.

Relax. Keep your legs in the stirrups. This will all be over soon.

But I know these words are not true.

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Fall 2018

The Remains of the Day Dorsía Smith Silva She had a corner to herself when the children got dropped off to sports practice and music lessons.

She could float into the folds of the seat covers, recline to park, and put up the visor to become invisible until half past.

Then Chelsea would call, “Mother, why aren’t you in front of the building?”

And David would pout, “All the other mothers come on time.”

In the evening, she fancied serving herself first, taking the juiciest part of the meat and giving Luther the leftovers.

She would leave the dishes on the table and tell the children to go bed without a bath.

Luther droned about picking up the dry cleaning.

Would she have time? Of course.

And the children wanted to stop by the mall too.

They filled in her blank pauses, without waiting for a ribbon of reply.

All she had left was sewn into fabric for minutes of the day.

Dorsía Smith Silva is a Full Professor of English at the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras and her poems have been published in Aji Magazine, Gravel, Apple Valley Review, Bright Sleep Magazine, Foliate Oak Literary Magazine, The B’K,WINK, Poetry Quarterly, POUI: Cave Hill Journal of Creative Writing, Adanna, Rigorous, Shot Glass Journal, Tonguas, and the book Mothers and Daughters.

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Fall 2018

Jewel Trees

C.W. Owens The elders have all died.

We are they, but in our minds the sun is still rising.

The clouds form overhead, and we turn to ask a question, to seek advice, but there are only ourselves and the young.

We’ve read all the books; we know what’s in them, and still we turn to the chair beside us to pose our question, and the young sitting there, say, Enjoy the ride, and it rings like mockery in the ear, and it shines like jewels on the trees.

C.W. Owens, lives in rural Ohio. His poems have appeared in a number of literary journals.

All You Can Eat at the Endangered Species Buffet

Rosemary Freedman At the all-you-can-eat endangered species buffet there is a 2-year wait, but I can pencil you in for May. This is one of those secret places, even conspirators have not imagined.

Tyger Tyger burning bright underneath a warming light.

The orangutans from Borneo and Sumatra are served with purple carrots.

Tasmanian devil is usually better I hear, but, I have only tasted it once, it could’ve been an off year.

The gorilla bush meat is especially tasty,

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Fall 2018 but don’t order the potatoes, I hear they are pasty.

The snow leopard shipped in from Kyrgyzstan is especially light, just 3 points on your Weight Watchers plan.

If you get the sea otter it comes with fur coats, and a photo of the men catching them, in fine wooden boats.

If you really just want simple there are bald eagles’ eggs with milk, and if you take it with a pinch of salt, it goes down just like silk.

The whooping crane oddly has a chicken taste.

Don’t take more than you want, we do not tolerate waste.

If you eat the blue whale, caught in an entangled net trust me, it’s filling and you’ll never forget.

If you eat the whole thing, your picture goes on the wall -so far there is just one man who finished it all.

The tiger and panda served together with lo mein has a flavor to die for, and was collected humane.

There is some wooly mammoth in the deep freeze, yes I know that it’s extinct, but if you ever have a thawed piece, trust me its distinct.

Side dishes of Morel mushrooms and Peacock spiders served on napkins of cashmere on plates that are jadeite, tourmaline and sapphire.

Some say this is decadent, eat all that will fill you -But if you tell anyone about us just know we will kill you.

Rosemary Freedman is married and has seven children. She has a B.A. in creative writing and literature, and a master's in nursing education, a post-masters as a Nurse Practitioner and a postmasters as a Clinical Nurse Specialist. When she is not writing poetry, she works as an advanced practice nurse.

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Fall 2018

I Shoved It Down

Gil Arzola matt got cancer and I shoved it down like the time an uncle hit me because I threw a rock but the old man had it coming had been asking for it, doing what you shouldn’t do to a five year old, shouldn’t do to anyone just like no one should get cancer.

But matt got it and I ached long the way my back would ache in migrant fields right there in that place between your shoulders where your neck meets your back like a crooked road.

Right there where you try to make sense of shit and insist God has His reasons and it’s like uncles that don’t want explanations and stuff you shove down with two hands but it won’t stay down.

Shove down with two hands but it won’t stay down.

Gil Arzola lives in Valparaiso, Indiana with his wife Linda and two dogs. Gil’s work has been published in Whetstone, Across The Board, The Elysian Review, Palabra and Grasslimb among others.

The Institutionalist Thomas Piekarski It was principally through intuition that he came upon the solution to his mind’s aching tooth. He would shirk the idea that his spirit was a prisoner of popular dogma and dismissed it as ruse. A public persona like Thoreau who made nature his best spiritual resource would serve as an appropriate model. He patently rejected vampire Ayn Rand’s revolting narcissism and harsh world view.

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Fall 2018 He pressed his own shirts, and sensible, wouldn’t dine in one of those greasy spoons where you could get sick.

Little homunculi came to visit him on happy occasions when he was deep in sleep, and swim the rapids of his ripe imagination. Often genii would appear like glossy aliens from an invisible planet. Genus, species, xylem and phloem all flowed through a mysterious emporium.

He praised angels and denounced the devils when they would come to dance around him, curry favor, attempt to sway his vote. He abhorred misogyny and remained staunchly in favor of women. Perfectionism guaranteed protection. Meaning jumbled by mixed metaphors not a viable alternative to posturing in a dim transcendental fog. The Constitution assured him the right to his belief that if love were to metastasize throughout the universe it would surely engulf it, and we would then be wrung inside out. With his patent leather shoes and seersucker suit he could be considered a dandy, but that isn’t true.

In fact he had little to do with society, preferred worlds where meaning plays messenger and the opposite too, in harmonious convergence. Protective of secret assets he blocked ghouls from raiding his full memory banks.

That our air is alive with super particles we can’t view he acknowledged. No isolationist, he kept in contact with past, present and future kin telepathically, stock apperceptions and religions salted away. Bound to his industrious holy ghost he would camp on desert sands in protest against injustices the government wrought.

Soul bought and spent every nanosecond, he relented to whims of forces way beyond his immediate control.

Thomas Piekarski is a former editor of the California State Poetry Quarterly and Pushcart Prize nominee. His poetry and interviews have appeared in literary journals internationally, including Nimrod, Florida English Journal, Cream City Review, Mandala Journal, Poetry Salzburg, Poetry Quarterly, Pennsylvania Literary Journal, and Boston Poetry Magazine. He has published a travel book, Best Choices In Northern California, and his epic adventure Ballad of Billy the Kid is available on Amazon in both Kindle and print versions.

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Fall 2018

The Un-Graduate

Thomas O’Dore Ben… is confused about his future as if Williams College graduates have a lot to worry about Travis… is confused about his present Vietnam combat veterans do have a lot to worry about Ben’s contemporaries stepped into positions fine Travis’ contemporaries stepped onto a landmine Ben... relieves his terrible confusion with the daily distraction of banging his future mother-in-law Travis… relieves his terrible confusion with the nightly distraction of banging his cab about Manhattan Ben… will go to grad school taking Elaine with him Travis…sent Iris back to middle school and left Betsy on the curb Benjamin Braddock… if you were Travis Bickle you really would have something to worry about

Guys like Tom O’Dore don’t have biographies.

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Fall 2018

Goodbye Tony Gloeggler Today, I picked Jesse up from music group. He said my name soon as I stepped through the door, tried to run to me. The therapist stood in his way, forced him to stay until he made eye contact, said goodbye to her assistant, the other kids. She slowly walked him over to me, assured me how much better he was doing while he tugged on my arm repeating ‘home’ louder and louder. I thanked her while we headed out the door, tried to keep him from jumping into every puddle, steer him from bumping into people as we turned down subway stairs.

Jesse took a window seat, got on his knees and traced the outline of his face as we rode.

I finger counted the six stops to Hamilton Parkway, promised that his mom would be waiting for him. When the train rose out of the ground, climbed up into the cloudless sky, he ran to the front door. I stood behind him, played with his hair as all of Red Hook spread beneath us.

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Fall 2018

I glanced at the other riders, curious whether they could tell something was wrong with Jesse then wondered what he was thinking, if his brain could hold anything other than shapes and colors flying past, the feel of glass against his fingertips, the thought that his mommy would be waiting three, now two, stations away.

I imagined what he would do if we stayed on longer, rode to Coney Island. Would he stop crying and fighting long enough to see or hear, smell, the ocean?

Would he run across the sand like the summer before, strip down to his shorts? Jump and play in the waves until the last light leaves the sky?

The closets are empty and piles of packed boxes line the walls of his house, but I’m not sure Jesse knows that this means he’s moving back to Maine in the morning.

I don’t know if he can grasp the concept of missing someone or understand how hard it is for me to keep from crying.

He has no idea that I met him three years ago. I went with Helen to pick him up from school one afternoon.

The Sunday after, finished with my bowl of oatmeal, I was watching her lift her teacup to her lips when I realized I wanted

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Fall 2018 to spend my life with her and it scared me to death.

I don’t know what Jesse remembers about Maine, about moving to Brooklyn; if he knows when things started to fall apart or why me and his mom couldn’t find a way to stay together; if he remembers that I moved down the block, kept visiting him while everyone I know told me to let go and move on, that I didn’t owe him a thing, and no one seemed to accept or understand I love Jesse, that the way he will never fit in the world reminds me of me and I wish he was my son, my eight year old boy.

My, my, mine.

[This poem was first published in The Ledge]

Tony Gloeggler is a life-long resident of New York City and has managed group homes for the mentally challenged in Brooklyn for over 35 years. His work has appeared in Rattle, Raleigh Review, Chiron Review, New Ohio Review, Spillway, Sundress and Juked. His full length books include One Wish Left (Pavement Saw Press 2002) and Until The Last Light Leaves (NYQ Books 2015).

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Fall 2018

Ode to Billy Collins Charles Grosel When things are going well, anything’s a poem.

Just frame the shot and snap it.

Scraps of colored paper mixed with petals dropped dry from the garden bush.

The sheen of dewdrops reviving sun-faded Little Tykes left out in the yard.

The loose geometry of French fries in their wax boats, snowy with salt crust.

The taste of dust raised by the vacuum cleaner’s carpet crosshatch.

Jeans bagging at the knees or fraying peek-a-boo, scrape or skin a story of its own.

The collapse to order deep in the genes.

Frame it and snap it.

Charles Grosel is an editor, writer, and poet living in Arizona. He has published stories in Western Humanities Review, Red Cedar Review, WaterStone, and The MacGuffin and poems in Slate, The Threepenny Review, Poet Lore, and Harpur Palate, among others.

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Fall 2018

California Thom Young I'm going away to California she said taking a fifth of gin and yesterday with me too.

I'll mail your heart in a pack of dry ice, soon as it stops beating for me but that might be awhile because people won't change. they love the idea that you love them more than they love you she said.

I waved bye then went back inside and died.

Thom Young is a writer from Texas. A 2016 Pushcart Prize nominee. His work has been in Poetry Quarterly, 3am magazine, Thieves Jargon, Word Riot, The Legendary, 48th Street Press, The Zombie Logic Review, Commonline Journal, and many other places. Featured poet and critic of social media poetry on PBS Newshour.

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Fall 2018

First Landing: At Seashore State Park

Mary Redman Beachfront property and a week together might mend the rift of the past two years, and so we stopped amid the trees of Cape Henry where white sand clung to gritty toes and drifted through our tent. Pine needles scented sea air, and lay like confetti across our campsite to form the shifting ground beneath our sleeping bags.

Together we explored this new terrain: Ghost crabs scurried to burrows as we reached for them. Acid green moths with lyre-shaped wings lazed on stumps along a hiking trail. A heron, yellow-crowned, stalked the swamp, cautious, on legs so thin they scarcely seemed enough to carry its body of feathers. Trees in scarves of Spanish moss marked our way—Bald Cypress, too, knee-deep, their knobby feet held fast in muck.

Days brimmed with bounty, nights with wine and local flounder cooked over open flame.

In the end, fine lines wove a web near your eyes as you told me how the English landed here before they founded Jamestown Colony. Peculiar fact to cite, but then I guessed meaning in your eyes and words, and knew that we, like other refugees, would leave this place—for undreamed homes— where we’d speak foreign dialects, and practice new religions—and one day die in strangers’ arms.

Mary Redman is a retired high school English teacher who currently supervises student teachers for University of Indianapolis. She is an active member of the Writers Center in Indianapolis and has taken classes with former Indiana Poet Laureate, Shari Wagner and with poet, Kyle Craig. She has had poems published in Flying Island, Three Line Poetry, Red River Review, Poetry Quarterly, and Northwest Indiana Literary Journal.

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Fall 2018

Left in Pittsburgh Miles Varana We had an argument one time.

Is this city a noun or verb?

You insisted noun, I contended verb.

You saw the cracks in the sidewalk, the fire escapes going up to nothing, the rain on the window pane, the streetcar stopped under the shoes hung on the powerline, laces white with snow.

What ever happened to jazz? You demanded.

I see the lights going out one by one, the dumpster lids slamming shut, the brunch spots coming alive at eleven, the passing of fancies, and the streetcar skating away from us with your scarf on a seat.

Miles Varana’s work has appeared in Typehouse, The Penn Review, Crack the Spine, and is forthcoming in Passages North. He has worked previously as a staff reader and managing editor at Hawai’i Pacific Review. Miles lives in Madison, Wisconsin, where he spends more time listening to podcasts than is probably healthy.

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Fall 2018

A Night So Beautiful We Had To Burn Down the Senator’s House #46 Darren C. Demaree Six bodies become one flame if they’re active enough at night to trick the blue moon into thinking it should disappear because real light has arrived.

A Night So Beautiful We Had To Burn Down the Senator’s House #47

Darren C. Demaree We brought no pages.

We brought only skin & liquor. Fire was easy.

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Fall 2018

A Night So Beautiful We Had To Burn Down the Senator’s House #48

Darren C. Demaree We all stopped to drink when we needed to get low enough to not be seen.

I could see his house from my squat. We could all see his house from the dirt we chose to wait in. There were bad berries there.

We ate them because they were waiting for us to eat them.

His house was waiting for us as well. It was empty for us to fill with as much flame as we could conjure. I don’t remember which one of us said the dead woman’s name first. It became a chant. We all cried with our teeth bared.

Darren C. Demaree is the author of nine poetry collections, most recently Bombing the Thinker, which was published by Backlash Press. He is the recipient of a 2018 Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award, the Louis Bogan Award from Trio House Press, and the Nancy Dew Taylor Award from Emrys Journal. He is the Managing Editor of the Best of the Net Anthology and Ovenbird Poetry. He is currently living in Columbus, Ohio with his wife and children.

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Fall 2018

Origin Myth Elton Glaser I was my mama’s little butterball in cowboy boots, With a cap gun and western vest, Shooting my blanks in the backyard where the blue snakes raced.

And daddy was knocking down the old wrecks for scrap and parts.

It was Hades in the shade, sweat Leaping off his bald head as he ripped the fenders free.

We lived at the edge of town, on a dead end street Of gravel and gutters, behind us The woods full of flying squirrels and low scrub oak.

On the wire fence in front of the house, mosquito hawks Waited for their prey, wings With an iridescent sheen, pivot of their scanning eyes.

Every afternoon, a lash of rain, and then steam Rising from the rusted junk, From the puddles I ran through near the mudbugs’ mound.

The watchdog hurled himself against his pen, a chain Throttling the mangy barks.

Branches of the fig tree hung heavy with their scrota of fruit.

I made my own sapling arrows and a greenwood bow.

I rode the swing seat, Lunging like a painted Sioux on a pinto pony.

And later, inside my cool room, I would read the days away, The words breaking me open Beyond the apron and the lug wrench and myself.

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Fall 2018

Nocturne in Phosphor Elton Glaser Half asleep, I’m in some dreamy Region of the mind, with thoughts So supple they slip among themselves, An ease and ooze as on a summer afternoon That melts into evening Without a murmur or a moon, Only, here and there, a firefly Like a faint idea picking its route through The slow dark, the thick of it, A sweet light In the honey of thinking, Until it comes, here and there, To a glow over itself, By which I see Some way out of the drowsy flow.

Elton Glaser has published eight full-length collections of poetry, most recently two books in 2013: Translations from the Flesh (Pittsburgh) and The Law of Falling Bodies (Arkansas), winner of the Miller Williams Arkansas Poetry Prize.

Elton lives in Akron, Ohio.

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Fall 2018

Little Moths Jessica Nguyen Baby moths in my bedroom Commander Deathshead with her heavy lids Slurps her cigarette Fainting in her fever dreams Her broken love songs don’t Burn hot The clockwork angels Fold their defiant wings Jessica Nguyen is a playwright, electronic musician, and writer living in Brooklyn. She has been published previously in Tipton Poetry Journal, Open Thought Vortex, Sisyphus Quarterly, Crab Fat Magazine, and The Sex Letters Project. She has also performed and written for The Boston Center for the Arts, The Living Gallery, Bindlestiff Studios, The Exponential Festival, and The Trans Theatre Festival.

Space Force Kyle Hunter He had made me more or less than a voyeur when he finally arrived at my shoulder, a Western Tanager encased in gold.

He sang to me and whispered, Laughter has no tongue, weeping no language.

Rooted in rubber boots and a suit and tie, I felt ice melting in the mountains, crags and canyons rattled like teeth.

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Fall 2018 And with that, the golden bird died, and I was alone in a field of seed potatoes.

I was not alone in the single wide with a view.

In the kitchen the children’s mother decapitated a giant silver pot. Feral tamales scurried out from the steam, screamed, and clambered down my gullet. I almost choked on the gold coating my throat. In the country where torture isn’t all bad again, the children taught me bits of Spanish: ¿Hay algo que pueda hacer para apoyarles? Bienvenido.

Tenemos bastante espacio para ustedes también. I taught them bits of English: I am not a criminal.

I do not mean any trouble.

Where is my mother?

They locked me up in their embrace, not ashamed to close their eyes and beg me to stay. I walked out into all the nothingness and cried.

The rise and fall of the empty land tried to soothe me, but all the golden birds had been killed and vanished into unseen cages.

Kyle Hunter’s poetry has appeared in Main Street Rag, Rockvale Review, So It Goes, Gravel, Foliate Oak, and elsewhere. He has a BFA in oil painting and a law degree. He lives in Indianapolis with his wife and four young children.

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Fall 2018

The Empty Tomb Keith Dunlap The angel of the Lord is having a cigarette, legs crossed, on a stone bench, twiddling a seraphic strand of hair, while waiting for the three expected women to appear, the ones bringing bags of myrrh and other spices which they plan to sprinkle on the corpse of the departed rabbi, as if he were a roasted leg of lamb.

Two of the three are called Mary, but he will not address them by name.

He is practicing what he should say: “Be not afraid,” he considers a little stiff, besides he has used it once before.

Oh, what does it matter, when everything has been preordained, and they are not going to heed him anyway?

When he hears their coming footsteps and listens to one of them complain that there is no one to help them roll the stone from the mouth of the cave, he quickly drops the cigarette and grinds it with his heel into the dirt floor.

He doesn’t bother to don his majesty.

He knows they will be “sorely amazed,” not at finding him there, but at missing the one whom they are trudging up the hill to see, the one already on his way to meet his apostles at Galilee.

Keith Dunlap’s work has appeared in numerous journals, including The Baltimore Review, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, The Carolina Quarterly, The Comstock Review, Ninth Letter, and Poet Lore. Hip Pocket Press published his first collection, Storyland, in 2016.

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Fall 2018

Tinfoil Hats Vinny Corsaro Every president has been a lizard person.

Scaly reptilians have always written laws and kissed our babies.

Brick by brick, they built Illuminatic pyramids, with Big Brother’s eyes watching scornfully from the top.

We were fed lies. The moon landing was faked, Kubrik’s dreams brought together with plaster, paper mache, and chalk. They say it was radiation, that’s why the flag moved in the tapes.

We know better.

Aliens capture us all the time. We’ve been prodded, probed, poked like lab rats. Little gray men, with branched fingers and bulbous black eyes, tap at our windows with the wind in the night.

All these things happen. All the time.

We are kept in the dark on purpose, blind monkeys playing on a chemical playground, Rothschild banks block us in, with iron bars, fluoride traps, and TV. It’s to prepare us for the New World Order, for the rising of the serpentine anti-Christ, when sheep all go to hell, and goats receive the kingdom of heaven.

This is the real Truth because of course we’ve been manipulated, of course there’s something else kept secret behind an opulent curtain.

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Fall 2018 Just the thought that alone, we could’ve been kings and queens and prophets, that alone, we could’ve built and burnt so much, that alone, we could’ve done all this makes us laugh so hard our sides split.

That’s crazy

Vinny Corsaro is a first year MFA student at Butler University. He was born in raised in Indianapolis, and is involved in both the musical and writing communities. He is an avid rock climber, reader, musician, and person. Recently, he published his first work of fiction in IU's Canvas Literary Arts Journal. He plans on living in Indianapolis with the intention of supporting local arts for the foreseeable future.

Scholastic Poetry Award John L. Stanizzi ~1966 ~ a triptych

those days seemed important the pressure to fit it was a hard road when I won a poetry award to prove I was a faggot my legs were shaved

when football and the confusion to be cool was hard won overwhelming I got jumped by the guys on the team

John L. Stanizzi is author of Ecstasy Among Ghosts, Sleepwalking, Dance Against the Wall, After the Bell, Hallelujah Time!, High Tide – Ebb Tide, and Chants. His poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, American Life in Poetry, The New York Quarterly, Paterson Literary Review, The Cortland Review, Rattle, Tar River Poetry, Rust & Moth, Connecticut River Review, Hawk & Handsaw, and others. John is coordinator of the Fresh Voices Poetry Competition for Young Poets at Hill-Stead Museum, Farmington, Connecticut.

He is also a teaching artist for the national recitation contest, Poetry Out Loud. A former New England Poet of the Year, John teaches literature at Manchester Community College lives with his wife, Carol, in Coventry, Connecticut.

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Fall 2018

Favorite Snacks Laura Johnson I’m in Publix, aisle five, searching for my son’s favorite foods, tortilla chips—restaurant style—and salsa.

Later, I’ll grab some pork chops for his dinner too.

He loves them with cornbread and greens.

I haven’t seen Caleb for four months; he’s been studying engineering in France, but he will be home soon.

My colleague’s son will not. This morning, our boss sent a “sad news” email.

It was Susan Harris’s son, David, killed Sunday in a motorcycle accident.

He was the same age as Caleb.

Did Susan go shopping Saturday, picking up whole milk because David didn’t like skim?

Perhaps she bought his favorite cereal— the kind no one else likes.

I reach for Caleb’s chips and think of Susan standing at her pantry, looking at that box of cereal—seal unbroken.

Laura Johnson’s work has appeared in several online and print journals, including Time of Singing, Snakeskin, The New Southern Fugitives, and Blue Heron Review. Her first book of poetry, “Not Yet”, is being published by Kelsay Books and will be available in April 2019. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from Fairfield University in 2017. She works as a high school ESOL teacher and lives in Georgia with her husband, almost-grown children, her cat, and her two dogs.

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Fall 2018

In tranquility.

DS MaolalaĂ­ it never hits, not until a certain time afterward. not for most people. you do what you do and go around and then later remember what happened and you get it good in the guts. happiness or sadness; either way it's later it comes. anger, love, poison, everything you feel. if people felt what they were feeling when they were feeling it then we'd all be sitting down and bawling in the streets, or passing time giggling at every moth. people are sometimes good to each other and sometimes they are cruel. the only time you realize what you've been is afterward.

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Fall 2018 and it must be said also that is just as well. otherwise we'd all be so wrapped up in emotion all the time like a duvet on a sunday morning and nobody would ever think to get the groceries or drive buses or catch any fish.

DS MaolalaĂ­ is a poet from Ireland who has been writing and publishing poetry for almost 10 years. His first collection, Love is Breaking Plates in the Garden, was published in 2016 by the Encircle Press, and he has a second collection forthcoming from Turas Press in 2019. He has been nominated for Best of the Web and twice for the Pushcart Prize.

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Fall 2018

Monet’s Haystack David Craig The haystacks undid him so often. They were unrelenting, especially during sunrises. A cold answer to streaks of pink. Another world, forming its flesh.

In the end, he had to give up straw like morning.

He’d leave them behind. Starlings would help, shooting up.

The ground was just that, where you started from.

The rest of the day was the print after the foot was gone.

A place of mercy, for children; a place he could live.

If there was a God, this had to be Him, he knew that.

We come here to inhabit the mystery of our lives; we come to touch God’s invisible face, with our paints, our hands, until He rustles in every room.

This was how Monet would paint, getting his lines, colors from some other side. He’d wait until the waiting finally found its place, just disappeared.

He couldn’t name creation, but the holy prayer made him every day: his call, the answer.

Let the monks have their beads, cells. He would wake the world.

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Fall 2018

A Wife for Cezanne David Craig Her name must be Aime. She will know Montana’s plains, ride horses bareback, a yellow rose in her teeth.

She’ll be quiet as the morning, except on high feast days.

I don’t know about you, but things never go my way.

My teeth could all be fixed, and still the bird of not-here would come and perch on my left shoulder.

What do you say when people seem to dis-allow you?

What do you do when silence, like a friend, smiles back?

(You can grunt in peace as you work toward the heart of things!)

Cezanne knew his paints, nothing else would come.

Mont Sainte-Victoire could’ve been the cleaning woman.

France could have danced a block over, in a different color.

The present wore him until he learned to move in its sleeves. Answers, questions, they went the way of evenings. A crust of bread and then some wine.

He and his wife seldom had to speak. They were part of the voice of the time, the art that had to come.

Cezanne was happy all through his life with that.

David Craig is the author of 24 books, 21 or which are poetry. He has published 300+ poems in journals and anthologies. David lives in West Virginia and has been at Franciscan University of Steubenville, teaching for 30 years.

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Fall 2018

Killing Frost Judy Young Aloneness overwhelming there is no meeting of minds Polite chatter that says nothing We grow apart; an ever-widening ravine, a suffocating staleness like musty water surrounds our thoughts Bitter sheet of frost killing all tender things growing to leave blackened, rotted stumps So, this is November

[

[This poem is from Judy’s collection, Wild Wood and Other Poems]

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Fall 2018

Homeward Judy Young The full persimmon moon rose over the misty wood Dark shadows hugged the ground Black limbs, leafless, spread over the sky looking like fishnet stockings I walked slowly, breathing in the air like a swimmer in cold water The fallen leaves rustling with my steps like empty liners in a chocolate box The silence of the woods echoed each step.

Too chill for the chirp of crickets too late for the song of birds the lane curved ahead hiding my destination of bath and bed

[This poem is from Judy’s collection, Wild Wood and Other Poems]

Judy Young is a member of Last Stanza Poetry Association and attends Brick Street Poetry events in Zionsville, Indiana. She is the author of Wild Wood and Other Poems. Judy has been writing poetry since childhood but, until recently, had kept all of her writings private. She spent every weekend in a small cabin in Brown County, Indiana as a child and teenager, one without electricity or plumbing or any modern conveniences. It was nothing she would have lived through by choice, but it added a raw flavor to the beginning of her life that she still can recall so many years later, like a perfume or powerful dream.

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Fall 2018

Woman on the Train Mary Hills Kuck No one on this train knows about my heart.

If any of them should look up from their phones, papers, tired re-runs of their work day, they would see me crushed between passengers, reading poems.

They would not know my heart is running away, beating syncopated rhythms like a conga drum, suggesting wild, enticing dances.

They would not know I have tried but failed to quiet this heart, and now, with time moving margins in, think I might yield and start to boogie to its beat.

What would they think if I stood here in this aisle and moved my aging torso to music only I could hear?

If I jived, arms up, down the car to the exit and back?

Maybe I’ll dance right out of this car, cha-cha up the escalator, whirl onto Park Street, twist out of sight.

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Fall 2018

At the death of my sister Mary Hills Kuck Lord, you didn’t shine me up the way you polished Moses.

He too thought he was unfit and didn’t even seek you like I do.

You sought him out.

You lighted up that bush for him, coiled his serpent staff, withered white, then healed his hand.

He had to know that it was you.

Forty days you spent with him, burnished him with all those words while he produced that famous stone, and then he shone, with your pure light.

At the brink of her great glory, (who would find it if not she), in that final wisp of air, could you not have kindled her and singed me too?

Mary Hills Kuck has retired from teaching English and Communications, first in the US and for many years in Jamaica. She now lives with her family in the woods in Massachusetts. Her poems have appeared in Long River Run, Connecticut River Review, Caduceus, SIMUL: Lutheran Voices in Poetry, Fever Grass: A collection of New & Established Caribbean Writers, Massachusetts State Poetry Anthology, the Aurorean, Tipton Poetry Journal, and others.

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Fall 2018

Kasyapa James K. Zimmerman holding up the single golden flower no words Gautama knew the one who smiled was the one to carry his robe and bowl when the body dispersed into yellow dust and blue light Kasyapa who smiled who knew everything when buddha said nothing climbed the great grey mountain to the place where the Next One Wholly Here And Now would come to receive Gautama’s golden robe and bowl Kasyapa entered the mountain washed in white-hot coolness lotus flowers reflecting the last bleeding light of the sun he remains here within the deep glowing center of the great grey mountain holding robe holding bowl still silent still waiting

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Fall 2018

Education James K. Zimmerman she was so very proud of him he too should be proud she said, because he didn't say I can't or I dowanna she gave him yellow smiley stickers three of them two way-to-gos and one high five she was teaching him to count she was teaching him his letters she was teaching him his colors he was learning how to smile he was learning sitting still he was learning not to sing

James K. Zimmerman is an award-winning poet and Pushcart Prize nominee. His work appears in Pleiades, Chautauqua, American Life in Poetry, The Carolina Quarterly, Miramar, and Nimrod, among others. He is author of Little Miracles (Passager, 2015) and Family Cookout (Comstock, 2016), winner of the Jessie Bryce Niles Prize.

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Fall 2018

Little Song for 1945

Roger Pfingston Sherman Street dead-ended into woods split by Pigeon Creek and still does in the river town of Evansville. Behind our house a playing field (long since denatured by urban sprawl) separated our backyard from a truck farm whose mysterious owners (old people) kept guineas that sometimes, somehow flew the coop, their cries like the kamikaze headlines of my childhood.

A retired teacher of English and photography, Roger Pfingston is the recipient of a poetry fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. His poems have appeared in American Journal of Poetry, Poet Lore, Spoon River Poetry Review, Innisfree Poetry Journal, and Ted Kooser’s column, American Life in Poetry. His chapbook, A Day Marked for Telling, is available from Finishing Line Press.

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Fall 2018

True North Joan Colby When the forest converts From deciduous to conifer It’s the true north that A raven flies over.

Wild turkeys surround our campsite.

Already, the night air chills.

You grill the meat To eat by firelight..

Our last child conceived Where woods met water, Stones shone wet with desire.

A full moon lays a silver knife Upon the lake’s dark platter.

All of this happens over and over On sites new and familiar. Walk Over layers of pine needles Leaving no footprints. It doesn’t matter.

Every life begins as an act Of passion, compliance or despair.

Joan Colby has published widely in journals such as Poetry, Atlanta Review, South Dakota Review, Gargoyle, Pinyon, Little Patuxent Review, Spillway, Midwestern Gothic and others. Awards include two Illinois Arts Council Literary Awards and an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship in Literature. She has published 21 books including Selected Poems from FutureCycle Press which received the 2013 FutureCycle Prize and Ribcage from Glass Lyre Press which has been awarded the 2015 Kithara Book Prize. Three of her poems have been featured on Verse Daily and another is among the winners of the 2016 Atlanta Review International Poetry Contest. Her newest books are Carnival from FutureCycle Press, The Seven Heavenly Virtues from Kelsay Books and Her Heartsongs from Presa Press.. Colby is a senior editor of FutureCycle Press and an associate editor of Good Works Review.

Website: www.joancolby.com. Facebook: Joan Colby.

Twitter: poetjm.

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Fall 2018

Greetings

Claire Keyes

So now when people ask me how are you? I usually don’t respond I’m a pain in the neck, a pebble in my shoe; I’m the tightness in my gut after reading about babies separated from their parents at the border; I’m rain on the parade, the cookout cancelled; I’m the urge to fluff the purple flowers gracing my windowsill; I’m the tremor passing through maples and elms outside my window, staghorn sumac lofting its red fruits in sultry July; I’m the binoculars around my neck scoping out the raptor perched on the cellular tower: a red-tail hawk; I’m the softness in my belly following a breakfast of eggs and toast; I’m the puzzled memory of my friend telling us she hates eggs and milk: no omelet bar for her; I’m the ditherer with the unmade bed, the late tax return; I’m the wind chimes, the voice in the elevator singing between floors; I’m Janis Joplin had she survived, Joni Mitchell, Renee Fleming; I’ll sing for my supper, if asked.

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Fall 2018

Golden Shovel Claire Keyes After Emily Dickinson

Suppose I were to ask the neighbors why they left their trash bags out so the gulls could do what gulls always do and gash the bags with beaks they use so well for this task, would the neighbors tell me to shut my mouth? When a car swishes by, gulls take to the roof. Me? I see them as diners waiting for a table and out of luck at a busy restaurant. But not out of trying to benefit from a mistake, table scraps their heaven.

And suppose I were to compare them, and certainly did to those swooping villagers in Zorba the Greek? Yes, I suppose it’s common to profit from a debility, to sing while grabbing the delectable stash: mine, it’s mine! Is it too absurd to hail a garbage truck’s arrival, barrel-crunching, loud?

Claire Keyes is the author of The Question of Rapture from Mayapple Press and the chapbook, Rising and Falling. A second book of poems, What Diamonds Can Do, was published in 2015 by Cherry Grove Collections. Her poems and reviews have appeared in Literary Bohemian, Sugar Mule, Innisfree Poetry Journal, Persimmon Tree, Comstock Review and on NPR’s The Writer’s Almanac. She is Professor emerita at Salem State University and lives in Marblehead, Massachusetts.

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Fall 2018

Mama Kept Her Secret Alarie Tennille As a child, Mama’s chicken and dumplings reminded me of “Diddle, diddle, dumpling, my son John.” That made me smile, even though I resented the chicken for not being fried.

When I got married, dumplings became her peace-offering to my new husband.

On Sunday afternoons, we’d go over to do laundry. Any reason to drop by Mama’s, included dinner.

Chris cooed over the best dumplings ever, then proved his praise by polishing off the pan.

No one expected Mama’s heart attack at age 59. I didn’t get her recipe before our next Sundays stopped. Neither did my brother.

A few years later, I hoped Maya Angelou’s cookbook would save me. Angelou added carrots, celery, and onions, making her broth even better. The chicken matched Mama’s.

But those dumplings? More like heavy clods of Arkansas clay than Mama’s sea-breeze dumplings from Georgia. We still miss Mama’s poetry on a plate.

Alarie Tennille graduated from the University of Virginia in the first class admitting women. She serves on the Emeritus Board of The Writers Place in Kansas City, Missouri. Her poetry collections, Waking on the Moon (2017), Running Counterclockwise (2014), and Spiraling into Control (2010), are available on Amazon. Please visit her new blog at alariepoet.com.

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Fall 2018

Invoking Laozi Changming Yuan Hiking along a less trodden trail in the Pacific Spirit Forest, I almost have to stop to find my Way out Because all roads have led me to nowhere But I keep walking until it is almost Laozi himself Pointing his fossilized fingers towards Dao (Which he says is no ordinary Way if it can Be named. Similarly if I can find it on my own It’s not the real or the right one.) Like a tour guide Who seems to know every path to and from the destiny Leading me like a dog, sometimes running well before him Sometimes beside him, more often going astray by myself Among the low bushes. I cannot help but follow him because The leash is getting so tightened I want to protest aloud: you Claim the great Way is no Way, but just follow Nature. Then Why keep me with a rope? Like every other domesticated dog I have a delicious bone right above my mouth, which makes Me keep running to my death, but never allowing me to have a bite

Changming Yuan published monographs on translation before leaving China. With a Canadian PhD in English, Yuan currently edits Poetry Pacific with Allen Yuan in Vancouver; credits include ten Pushcart nominations, the 2018 Naji Naaman's Literary Prize, Best of the Best Canadian Poetry, BestNewPoemsOnline, Threepenny Review and 1,459 others worldwide.

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Fall 2018

Three Small Pieces for My Grandmother Timothy Robbins

What time is it?

When her joints ached, “Time old dogs was dyin’. Don’t you feel sick?”

When she felt frisky, “Time old dogs was dyin’. Ain’t you glad you’re a pup?” or if it was me asking, “Ain’t you glad you’re my pup?”

Flowering In the nursing home she has taken to lying, her imagination blooming like one of those deserts that drink heavy rain once a century.

Christmas She lies in her hospital bed like Baby Jesus in his manger. He was the only one there who didn’t know who Christ was. I’m the only one here who knows that manger comes from the Old French for eat.

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Fall 2018

MRI God’s Machine Timothy Robbins

Spiritual bravado aside, my hour in that high-tech metal coffin was beginning and end of pride. I had little room and was commanded not to use the little I had. My nerves were bombarded.

Radiation like attraction permeated my cells. My ears, all my senses, shattered like a crystal vase hurled at ruthless defenses. Rifles were fired at heaven, cymbals, gongs, drums were banged — a shivaree for honeymooners that would either force peace on feuding molecule clans or spray blood on wedding snow. Spiritual bravado aside, that crossfire between giant warring magnets was as close to God as I wish to come

Timothy Robbins has been a regular contributor to Hanging Loose since 1978. His poems have appeared in Main Street Rag, Off The Coast, Bayou Magazine, Slant, Tipton Review and many others. He has published three volumes of poetry: Three New Poets (Hanging Loose Press), Denny’s Arbor Vitae (Adelaide Books) and Carrying Bodies (Main Street Rag Press). He lives in Wisconsin with his husband of twenty years.

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Fall 2018

The Robin’s Song Tom Raithel Behind the December fog that steals like a fugitive over the pre-dawn streets, past the guardian eyes of streetlamps, the grim iron gates and imprisoned gardens, over imploring arms of bare trees, the crestfallen faces of broken houses, the song of a robin, blazing and clear, echoing out over roofs and branches, piercing through all the knotted night, ringing with hope, desire, praise, or whatever beats in that small, feathered breast that not even winter dark can constrain.

Tom Raithel grew up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and has worked as a journalist at several newspapers in the Midwest. Today, he lives in Evansville, Indiana with his wife, Theresa. His poems have appeared in The Southern Review, The Comstock Review, Nimrod, Midwest Quarterly, Atlanta Review, and other journals. Finishing Line Press has published his chapbook, Dark Leaves, Strange Light.

Dread Kimberly Prijatel What if I look down in the Port-o-John and there is a man under the filth, only his eyes and forehead ribbeting like a cartoon frog in a swamp?

What if the bees keep dying faster than the synaptic light in my father’s head?

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Fall 2018

I used to pray that forever had a back cover until my mother told me to stop and steel myself against the demons both in my brain and out demons who leak pesticides into the cerebral channels demons worshipping rockstars literal demons above the bed Droves of bees blink out dropping midair like paperweights my father is telling me to turn back the clock again and again his stories mock the ears like music from violin necks or the sound of bees on the chalkboard My father wrinkling and unwrinkling My mother’s vertex of wicked charisma Bees lost at the ark of conversant towers The man, in the Port-O-John, demon below me ribbeting, iris regulating light

Kimberly Prijatel studies policy at the Ohio State University. She's been published in Devilfish Review, Storm Cellar, Synapse, and others. When she was 5, she bit the mailman.

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Fall 2018

New Child Dick Bentley From the teeming sky he falls Sizzling past the spacemen.

This infant is a house on fire, Burning into our spirits.

We close our eyes and hear the blaze rage, Catch the rooftop’s crackle.

Soon he’ll lift his empty spoon To catch the embers.

He came from far away, trillions of light years, Before he came hurtling into our kitchen like a comet.

Eternity is endless even in a universe as young As our newborn.

Dick Bentley’s books, Post-Freudian Dreaming, A General Theory of Desire, and All Rise are available on Amazon. He won the Paris Writers/Paris Review’s International Fiction Award and has published over 260 works of fiction, poetry, and memoir in the US, the UK, France, Canada, and Brazil. He served on the Board of the Modern Poetry Association and has taught at the University of Massachusetts. Check his website, www.dickbentley.com.

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Fall 2018

Exorcism of My Father Lisa Eve Cheby My hair faded from brown to gray. Dad wore his brown pinstriped suit from our final family portrait, our flesh preserved in high gloss.

Like in a dream, I find I am lost when least expected.

Who expects her dead father on Thanksgiving to sit in a corner and watch her play adult, bearing bowls of cranberry sauce and spiral sliced ham?

Pinstriped meat glazed to stop decay as unnatural as his hair still brown.

The sweet smell of honey mingles with the bleach of linens stuck to the varnish dulled by lemon Pledge.

To out-age a father: in a dream, anything should be expected.

There must be more than meat and bones and cells that rebel, the dead ones rising to the surface to be shed, fleeting as the salve-scent of Dad's hair – I douse mine with nutmeg dye that stings my scalp, like dreams that fade black to this: I smell his hair, a musk as thick as the scent between my thighs as I leave a strand torn from its root, like me, beside a lover sleeping in soured sweat.

Such turns in dreams are not unexpected.

But this is real: I am the ham on the table covered with bleached sheets. Antiseptic tubes carry oxygen to my nose and a camera to my colon, its pink tissue projected on a TV showing I’m mutation-free: the pictures we'll never print.

I stop this repetition

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Fall 2018

Kitchen Closed Lisa Eve Cheby i.

Nagymama's hands with knuckles round as the Nilla wafers lining the bowls in which she scoops vanilla ice cream for my sister and me.

We did not know ii.

those fingers were once long and lithe, or her voice, broken in English, once rose and dipped through alto lines in the Hungarian choir, the voice of this young widow, Erzi, not yet Nagymama, wooing wayward refugees. Blithe and lost men, they wanted a wife to hire, a mere maid to snag in nets cast with hope of palinka served with pungent paprikas, but Erzi knew

it would all fade into sentences of dishes to wash after cooking a hearty gyulas for a man who would suck her tits raw.

She hung her apron, waited for dinner to thaw. iii.

After the constant whirrs and clacks, of factory fluorescents echoed in the click and pop of her bones each step back home, to her daughter, Helen, just eight, all alone unless to the neighbor's she escaped, where a TV flickered blue across her sleeping face.

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Fall 2018

Erzi took Helen's hand, led her home across the hall, boiled water, filled the dull grey tub, metal, like cans she filled all day. As Helen bathed, Erzi brewed tea with honey and lemon.

The oven clanged cool as Helen's breath tired, sounds that soothed Erzi like the hymns she sang in choir. iv.

Nagymama turns off the TV, tucks afghans under our feet, and leaves our empty bowls to the kitchen sink.

Lisa Eve Cheby’s poems, essays, and reviews have appeared in various journals and anthologies. Lisa’s chapbook, Love Lessons from Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Dancing Girl Press) was featured in The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed Series. She was also a 2017 Writer in Residence at SAFTA's Firefly Farms Residency. Lisa holds an MFA from Antioch and an MLIS from SJSU. http://lisacheby.wordpress.com

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Fall 2018

Doll of Loved Parts Jeanine Stevens ~The true toy is a poetic object.

Charles Simic I rummage in my box of discards purchased from an estate sale: split arms, fractured legs, overlarge stuffed bodies.

Various heads don’t match.

I could assemble a person of parts who was loved so much: grabbed by the hair, swung around until an arm came loose— better than being ignored.

I remember the autistic boy for years stroking a stuffed duck he named Gary.

When new, a bright yellow, but over time, so much cradling, Gary lost his fuzz.

Eventually rubbed down to a miniature pelt shiny as satin, the scrap is still tacked to the man’s CD cabinet.

Laying out my finds, I discover I have enough to do multiples, an entire diorama of loved parts.

Jeanine Stevens is the author of "Inheritor" (Future Cycle Press), and "Sailing on Milkweed," (Cherry Grove Collections). Winner of the MacGuffin Poet Hunt (selected by Phil Levine), The Stockton Arts Commission Award and The Ekphrasis Prize. Her latest chapbook, "Brief Immensity," won the Finishing Line Press Open Chapbook Award. Poems have appeared in Poet Lore, Evansville Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Chiron Review, Pearl, Stoneboat, and Rosebud.

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Fall 2018

I Dream of the Blue River George Freek

(After Mei Yao Chen)

A goose floats on the river, so I can almost touch him.

In an ugly mood, he honks at me.

On this wind-blown day, leaves fall, denuding the trees.

I can’t see that wind, but I can feel its breeze.

I can’t see the Milky Way, yet I know it’s there, somewhere.

Who says we only know what we see? Who can see the atoms in a cup of tea?

I can’t see my dead wife, but feel she’s everywhere with me.

Each day is different than the last, but when I sleep, everything is as it used to be.

Was it all a dream?

Clouds drift past, and disappear, as this river is swallowed by the sea.

George Freek is a poet/playwright living in Belvidere, Illionois. He has previously published in Tipton Ppoetry Journal; his poetry has also recently appeared in The Adelaide Review; Big Windows Review; and Carcinogenic Poetry. His plays are published by Playscripts, Inc.; Lazy Bee Scripts; and Off The Wall Plays.

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Fall 2018

Dayenu Jill Evans

– an ancient Hebrew word meaning “just this would have been enough” repeated at the Jewish holiday table in gratitude for blessings When the holidays are over, then it is our time to take the center leaf out of the table and let the dining room grow still and bare in tidy memories.

Each time, a quiet fullness says ‘Dayenu’.

My nomadic children left the table all those years ago to our safe-keeping, roving far away to forage and to find.

And on holidays it is again Dayenu when they return, when there are more arms gathered home – both thick and thin – reaching out for platters heaped with favorite foods, when elastic shadows frolic in the candlelight, when their glowing faces relish flavors from their youth, soaking up the tang and sweet of it by heart.

Each year when they come back, they offer more: more of who they are, more of what they’ve seen, wanting less of what they’ve lost - or left behind.

And each time they arrive, they bring fresh hungers to fulfill, until their mouths overflow with the stories of the worlds they want to tell.

They are needing childhood joys, and still craving more of life than simple happiness.

This too is Dayenu.

Year by sprawling year, our table’s surface grows more cracked and grooved with life’s abrasions, as if the worn-down wood itself could hold onto family conversations with hieroglyphic scuffs and stains etched into a familiar background like a road map, timeless and indelible as memory.

And this year, in the crisp transparency of daylight,

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Fall 2018 we will again restore the shorter, serene version of the table to itself, and shove its vacant inlaid ends into a single slab, and it will read: ‘Dayenu’, in the veined way our lives are all inscribed in it together – not because of what remains there, but because of all that changes.

Inside Kol Nidre Jill Evans It is a slow and luscious labyrinth leading inward – Bruck’s familiar melody. Each year it begins for me behind closed eyes. Notes drift into place, one-by-one, in cautious tones of time, as they begin a fresh descent into remembrance that is suddenly too fragile. I am its shadow, holding onto love’s comfort with a vulnerable hand.

And all at once, a cello pulls me into loss, into the life of it. So I enter, not knowing why, but needing to be there, to visit sorrow and guilt and regret, to rekindle loneliness for the people I have lost as sanctuary walls dissolve into wisps of atmosphere, into the grainy cough, the indrawn breath beside me, the far-off baby’s cry, scattering my solitude, and then, as all distractions do, these too recede.

And far beyond the music, a stillness surfaces: stark as the gaps between the keening notes, between the life and loss surrounding us, between the solemn promise and its breaking point.

An internal hush connects me

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Fall 2018 to our space, full of private burdens, where each person’s sorrows are fierce and invisible as mine.

I am plunging now into this prayer, headlong into naked tones leading straight into the bloodstream, veering this way and that, in and out of honesty as it lifts the light high above the damaged darkness.

And once again, I may have found my way into my own huge, bursting grief. It is held together only by a single strand of melody that spills and falls and floats and unwinds and finally, just like that, it rolls me out, weightless and open-eyed, on the other side of grace.

Jill Evans, also known as Jill Evans Petzall, makes documentary films, media art installations, writes poetry, and teaches about social justice from a female perspective. She is the winner of four Emmy Awards for her scripts and documentary films. Jill also designs and crafts one-of-a-kind jewelry in her company, Touchstones Designs. She lives in St. Louis, Missouri, and started her career in her 40s while raising three young children as a single mother. All her work is fueled by a graduate degree in Philosophy. Now in her 70s, she has just begun to publish the poetry that she has been writing all her life.

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Fall 2018

The Editors Editor Barry Harris is editor of the Tipton Poetry Journal and two anthologies by Brick Street Poetry: Mapping the Muse: A Bicentennial Look at Indiana Poetry and Words and Other Wild Things. He has published one poetry collection, Something At The Center.

Barry lives in Brownsburg, Indiana and is retired from Eli Lilly and Company.

His poetry has appeared in Kentucky Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Grey Sparrow, Silk Road Review, Saint Ann‘s Review, Boston Literary Magazine, Night Train, Silver Birch Press, Flying Island, Awaken Consciousness, Writers‘ Bloc, and Red-Headed Stepchild. One of his poems was on display at the National Museum of Sport and another is painted on a barn in Boone County, Indiana as part of Brick Street Poetry‘s Word Hunger public art project. His poems are also included in these anthologies: From the Edge of the Prairie; Motif 3: All the Livelong Day; and Twin Muses: Art and Poetry.

Assistant Editor Natalie McCann is assistant editor of the Tipton Poetry Journal. She is a Creative Writing graduate who had judged for University of Indianapolis’ Etchings Literary and Fine Arts Magazine and Whirling Prize.

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Fall 2018

Contributor Biographies Gil Arzola lives in Valparaiso, Indiana with his wife Linda and two dogs. Gil’s work has been published in Whetstone, Across The Board, The Elysian Review, Palabra and Grasslimb among others.

Dick Bentley’s books, Post-Freudian Dreaming, A General Theory of Desire, and All Rise are available on Amazon. He won the Paris Writers/Paris Review’s International Fiction Award and has published over 260 works of fiction, poetry, and memoir in the US, the UK, France, Canada, and Brazil. He served on the Board of the Modern Poetry Association and has taught at the University of Massachusetts. Check his website, www.dickbentley.com.

Lisa Eve Cheby’s poems, essays, and reviews have appeared in various journals and anthologies. Lisa’s chapbook, Love Lessons from Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Dancing Girl Press) was featured in The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed Series. She was also a 2017 Writer in Residence at SAFTA's Firefly Farms Residency. Lisa holds an MFA from Antioch and an MLIS from SJSU and lives in California. http://lisacheby.wordpress.com Joan Colby has published widely in journals such as Poetry, Atlanta Review, South Dakota Review, Gargoyle, Pinyon, Little Patuxent Review, Spillway, Midwestern Gothic and others. Awards include two Illinois Arts Council Literary Awards and an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship in Literature. She has published 21 books including Selected Poems from FutureCycle Press which received the 2013 FutureCycle Prize and Ribcage from Glass Lyre Press which has been awarded the 2015 Kithara Book Prize. Three of her poems have been featured on Verse Daily and another is among the winners of the 2016 Atlanta Review International Poetry Contest. Her newest books are Carnival from FutureCycle Press, The Seven Heavenly Virtues from Kelsay Books and Her Heartsongs from Presa Press.. Colby is a senior editor of FutureCycle Press and an associate editor of Good Works Review. Website: www.joancolby.com. Facebook: Joan Colby. Twitter: poetjm.

Vinny Corsaro is a first year MFA student at Butler University. He was born in raised in Indianapolis, and is involved in both the musical and writing communities. He is an avid rock climber, reader, musician, and person. Recently, he published his first work of fiction in IU's Canvas Literary Arts Journal. He plans on living in Indianapolis with the intention of supporting local arts for the foreseeable future.

David Craig is the author of 24 books, 21 or which are poetry. He has published 300+ poems in journals and anthologies. David lives in West Virginia and has been at Franciscan University of Steubenville, teaching for 30 years.

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Fall 2018 Darren C. Demaree is the author of nine poetry collections, most recently Bombing the Thinker, which was published by Backlash Press. He is the recipient of a 2018 Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award, the Louis Bogan Award from Trio House Press, and the Nancy Dew Taylor Award from Emrys Journal. He is the Managing Editor of the Best of the Net Anthology and Ovenbird Poetry. He is currently living in Columbus, Ohio with his wife and children.

Keith Dunlap’s work has appeared in numerous journals, including The Baltimore Review, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, The Carolina Quarterly, The Comstock Review, Ninth Letter, and Poet Lore. Hip Pocket Press published his first collection, Storyland, in 2016. Keith lives in Maine.

Jill Evans, also known as Jill Evans Petzall, makes documentary films, media art installations, writes poetry, and teaches about social justice from a female perspective. She is the winner of four Emmy Awards for her scripts and documentary films. Jill also designs and crafts one-of-a-kind jewelry in her company, Touchstones Designs. She lives in St. Louis, Missouri, and started her career in her 40s while raising three young children as a single mother. All her work is fueled by a graduate degree in Philosophy. Now in her 70s, she has just begun to publish the poetry that she has been writing all her life.

Rosemary Freedman is married and has seven children. She has a B.A. in creative writing and literature, and a master's in nursing education, a postmasters as a Nurse Practitioner and a post-masters as a Clinical Nurse Specialist.

When she is not writing poetry, she works as an advanced practice nurse.

George Freek is a poet/playwright living in Belvidere, Illionois. He has previously published in Tipton Ppoetry Journal; his poetry has also recently appeared in The Adelaide Review; Big Windows Review; and Carcinogenic Poetry. His plays are published by Playscripts, Inc.; Lazy Bee Scripts; and Off The Wall Plays.

Elton Glaser has published eight full-length collections of poetry, most recently two books in 2013: Translations from the Flesh (Pittsburgh) and The Law of Falling Bodies (Arkansas), winner of the Miller Williams Arkansas Poetry Prize.

Elton lives in Akron, Ohio.

Tony Gloeggler is a life-long resident of New York City and has managed group homes for the mentally challenged in Brooklyn for over 35 years. His work has appeared in Rattle, Raleigh Review, Chiron Review, New Ohio Review, Spillway, Sundress and Juked. His full length books include One Wish Left (Pavement Saw Press 2002) and Until The Last Light Leaves (NYQ Books 2015).

Charles Grosel is an editor, writer, and poet living in Arizona. He has published stories in Western Humanities Review, Red Cedar Review, WaterStone, and The MacGuffin and poems in Slate, The Threepenny Review, Poet Lore, and Harpur Palate, among others.

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Fall 2018 Kyle Hunter’s poetry has appeared in Main Street Rag, Rockvale Review, So It Goes, Gravel, Foliate Oak, and elsewhere. He has a BFA in oil painting and a law degree. He lives in Indianapolis with his wife and four young children.

Laura Johnson’s work has appeared in several online and print journals, including Time of Singing, Snakeskin, The New Southern Fugitives, and Blue Heron Review. Her first book of poetry, “Not Yet”, is being published by Kelsay Books and will be available in April 2019. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from Fairfield University in 2017. She works as a high school ESOL teacher and lives in Georgia with her husband, almost-grown children, her cat, and her two dogs.

Michael Keshigian from New Hampshire, has been published in numerous national and international journals, recently including Aji, Red River Review, Passager Journal, Blue Pepper, Young Ravens Literary Review and has appeared as feature writer in over a twenty publications with 6 Pushcart Prize and 2 Best Of The Net nominations. (michaelkeshigian.com) Claire Keyes is the author of The Question of Rapture from Mayapple Press and the chapbook, Rising and Falling. A second book of poems, What Diamonds Can Do, was published in 2015 by Cherry Grove Collections. Her poems and reviews have appeared in Literary Bohemian, Sugar Mule, Innisfree Poetry Journal, Persimmon Tree, Comstock Review and on NPR’s The Writer’s Almanac. She is Professor emerita at Salem State University and lives in Marblehead, Massachusetts.

Mary Hills Kuck has retired from teaching English and Communications, first in the US and for many years in Jamaica. She now lives with her family in the woods in Massachusetts. Her poems have appeared in Long River Run, Connecticut River Review, Caduceus, SIMUL: Lutheran Voices in Poetry, Fever Grass: A collection of New & Established Caribbean Writers, Massachusetts State Poetry Anthology, the Aurorean, Tipton Poetry Journal, and others.

Marianne Lyon has been a music teacher for 43 years. After teaching in Hong Kong, she returned to the Napa Valley and has been published in various literary magazines and reviews including Ravens Perch, TWJM Magazine, Earth Daughters and Indiana Voice Journal. She was nominated for the Pushcart prize in 2017. She is a member of the California Writers Club and an Adjunct Professor at Touro University in California.

DS Maolalaí is a poet from Ireland who has been writing and publishing poetry for almost 10 years. His first collection, Love is Breaking Plates in the Garden, was published in 2016 by the Encircle Press, and he has a second collection forthcoming from Turas Press in 2019. He has been nominated for Best of the Web and twice for the Pushcart Prize.

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Fall 2018 Jessica Nguyen is a playwright, electronic musician, and writer living in Brooklyn. She has been published previously in Tipton Poetry Journal, Open Thought Vortex, Sisyphus Quarterly, Crab Fat Magazine, and The Sex Letters Project. She has also performed and written for The Boston Center for the Arts, The Living Gallery, Bindlestiff Studios, The Exponential Festival, and The Trans Theatre Festival.

Guys like Tom O’Dore do not have biographies.

C.W. Owens, lives in rural Ohio. His poems have appeared in a number of literary journals.

A retired teacher of English and photography, Roger Pfingston is the recipient of a poetry fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. His poems have appeared in American Journal of Poetry, Poet Lore, Spoon River Poetry Review, Innisfree Poetry Journal, and Ted Kooser’s column, American Life in Poetry. His chapbook, A Day Marked for Telling, is available from Finishing Line Press.

Thomas Piekarski is a former editor of the California State Poetry Quarterly and Pushcart Prize nominee. His poetry and interviews have appeared in literary journals internationally, including Nimrod, Florida English Journal, Cream City Review, Mandala Journal, Poetry Salzburg, Poetry Quarterly, Pennsylvania Literary Journal, and Boston Poetry Magazine. He has published a travel book, Best Choices In Northern California, and his epic adventure Ballad of Billy the Kid is available on Amazon in both Kindle and print versions.

Kimberly Prijatel studies policy at the Ohio State University. She's been published in Devilfish Review, Storm Cellar, Synapse, and others. When she was 5, she bit the mailman.

Tom Raithel grew up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and has worked as a journalist at several newspapers in the Midwest. Today, he lives in Evansville, Indiana with his wife, Theresa. His poems have appeared in The Southern Review, The Comstock Review, Nimrod, Midwest Quarterly, Atlanta Review, and other journals. Finishing Line Press has published his chapbook, Dark Leaves, Strange Light.

Mary Redman is a retired high school English teacher who currently supervises student teachers for University of Indianapolis. She is an active member of the Writers Center in Indianapolis and has taken classes with former Indiana Poet Laureate, Shari Wagner and with poet, Kyle Craig. She has had poems published in Flying Island, Three Line Poetry, Red River Review, Poetry Quarterly, and Northwest Indiana Literary Journal.

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Fall 2018 Timothy Robbins has been a regular contributor to Hanging Loose since 1978.

His poems have appeared in Main Street Rag, Off The Coast, Bayou Magazine, Slant, Tipton Review and many others. He has published three volumes of poetry: Three New Poets (Hanging Loose Press), Denny’s Arbor Vitae (Adelaide Books) and Carrying Bodies (Main Street Rag Press). He lives in Wisconsin with his husband of twenty years.

Norma Sadler lives in California and has published essays, poetry, or short stories in St. Andrews Review, Chanteh: the Iranian Cross Cultural Quarterly,the cold drill, Pembroke Quarterly, NCTE Journal, Tipton Poetry Journal, Japanophile, Wanderings, and online at Cyberoasis, Moondance, Mused Bella-on-line, Verse-Virtual, Green Silk Journal, and others. Her blog is nsnetnov.blogspot.com, where her paintings appear with her written works. She has two novels on Amazon Kindle.

Dorsía Smith Silva is a Full Professor of English at the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras and her poems have been published in Aji Magazine, Gravel, Apple Valley Review, Bright Sleep Magazine, Foliate Oak Literary Magazine, The B’K,WINK, Poetry Quarterly, POUI: Cave Hill Journal of Creative Writing, Adanna, Rigorous, Shot Glass Journal, Tonguas, and the book Mothers and Daughters.

John L. Stanizzi is author of Ecstasy Among Ghosts, Sleepwalking, Dance Against the Wall, After the Bell, Hallelujah Time!, High Tide – Ebb Tide, and Chants. His poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, American Life in Poetry, The New York Quarterly, Paterson Literary Review, The Cortland Review, Rattle, Tar River Poetry, Rust & Moth, Connecticut River Review, Hawk & Handsaw, and others. John is coordinator of the Fresh Voices Poetry Competition for Young Poets at Hill-Stead Museum, Farmington, Connecticut.

He is also a teaching artist for the national recitation contest, Poetry Out Loud. A former New England Poet of the Year, John teaches literature at Manchester Community College lives with his wife, Carol, in Coventry, Connecticut.

Jeanine Stevens lives in California and is the author of "Inheritor" (Future Cycle Press), and "Sailing on Milkweed," (Cherry Grove Collections). Winner of the MacGuffin Poet Hunt (selected by Phil Levine), The Stockton Arts Commission Award and The Ekphrasis Prize. Her latest chapbook, "Brief Immensity," won the Finishing Line Press Open Chapbook Award. Poems have appeared in Poet Lore, Evansville Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Chiron Review, Pearl, Stoneboat, and Rosebud.

Alexey Stiop is a professional photographer, whose work has been featured in books, articles, marketing campaigns, and hung in private collections. Originally from Moscow, Russia, Alexey now calls Central Kentucky, USA home. https://alexey-stiop.pixels.com

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Fall 2018 Alarie Tennille graduated from the University of Virginia in the first class admitting women. She serves on the Emeritus Board of The Writers Place in Kansas City, Missouri. Her poetry collections, Waking on the Moon (2017), Running Counterclockwise (2014), and Spiraling into Control (2010), are available on Amazon. Please visit her new blog at alariepoet.com.

Miles Varana’s work has appeared in Typehouse, The Penn Review, Crack the Spine, and is forthcoming in Passages North. He has worked previously as a staff reader and managing editor at Hawai’i Pacific Review. Miles lives in Madison, Wisconsin, where he spends more time listening to podcasts than is probably healthy.

Deborah Walker began writing poetry in 2012 after she and her husband moved from the city to a log cabin on sixty acres. She is a member of the Ohio Poetry Association and her work has also appeared in its annual journal Common Threads.

Judy Young is a member of Last Stanza Poetry Association and attends Brick Street Poetry events in Zionsville, Indiana. She is the author of Wild Wood and Other Poems. Judy has been writing poetry since childhood but, until recently, had kept all of her writings private. She spent every weekend in a small cabin in Brown County, Indiana as a child and teenager, one without electricity or plumbing or any modern conveniences. It was nothing she would have lived through by choice, but it added a raw flavor to the beginning of her life that she still can recall so many years later, like a perfume or powerful dream.

Thom Young is a writer from Texas. A 2016 Pushcart Prize nominee. His work has been in Poetry Quarterly, 3am magazine, Thieves Jargon, Word Riot, The Legendary, 48th Street Press, The Zombie Logic Review, Commonline Journal, and many other places. Featured poet and critic of social media poetry on PBS Newshour.

Changming Yuan published monographs on translation before leaving China.

With a Canadian PhD in English, Yuan currently edits Poetry Pacific with Allen Yuan in Vancouver; credits include ten Pushcart nominations, the 2018 Naji Naaman's Literary Prize, Best of the Best Canadian Poetry, BestNewPoemsOnline, Threepenny Review and 1,459 others worldwide.

James K. Zimmerman lives in New York and is an award-winning poet and Pushcart Prize nominee. His work appears in Pleiades, Chautauqua, American Life in Poetry, The Carolina Quarterly, Miramar, and Nimrod, among others. He is author of Little Miracles (Passager, 2015) and Family Cookout (Comstock, 2016), winner of the Jessie Bryce Niles Prize.

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