Tipton Poetry Journal Summer 2022
Cover Photo: Morning Mist by Brendan Crowley. Barry Harris, Editor Copyright 2022 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 Summer 2022 Tipton Poetry Journal
Tipton Poetry Journal, located in the heartland of the Midwest, publishes quality poetry from Indiana and around the world.
Statistics: This issue features 39 poets from the United States (17 different states), 2 poets from Canada, and poets from China, Mexico and Ukraine.
Editor’s Note
Our Featured Poem this issue is “Swimming,” written by Mea Andrews. Mea’s poem, which also receives an award of $25, can be found on page 2. The featured poem was chosen by the Board of Directors of Brick Street Poetry, Inc., the Indiana non profit organization who publishes Tipton Poetry Journal.
Barry Harris reviews Shopping Cat Dreams by Gene Twaronite.
Tipton Poetry Journal Summer 2022 Contents Lizzy Ke Polishan ...................................................................................... 1 Mea Andrews .............................................................................................. 2 Mary Sexson ................................................................................................ 4 Claire Scott .................................................................................................. 6 William Greenway .................................................................................... 8 Charlene Langfur ...................................................................................... 9 George Moore ........................................................................................... 10 Nettie Farris .............................................................................................. 11 James Mulhern ......................................................................................... 12 Timothy Robbins ..................................................................................... 13 Roger Pfingston ....................................................................................... 14 Matthew Brennan ................................................................................... 16 Rebecca Hill............................................................................................... 18 Jack e Lorts ................................................................................................ 19 Nolo Segundo ............................................................................................ 20 Jessica D. Thompson .............................................................................. 21 J.J. Steinfeld ............................................................................................... 22 Gloria Parker ............................................................................................ 23 Vicki Ioro .................................................................................................... 24 Cecil Morris ............................................................................................... 25 Carol Lynn Stevenson Grellas ............................................................. 26 Bruce Levine ............................................................................................. 29 Benjamin Nash ......................................................................................... 30 Stephanie Keep ........................................................................................ 31 Jill Michelle ................................................................................................ 32
Tipton Poetry Journal Summer 2022 David Vancil .............................................................................................. 33 George Freek............................................................................................. 34 Patrick T. Reardon .................................................................................. 34 John Grey .................................................................................................... 36 Rosemary Freedman.............................................................................. 36 Stewart Mintzer ....................................................................................... 38 Anne Whitehouse .................................................................................... 40 Sharon Lopez Mooney ........................................................................... 42 Michael Keshigian .................................................................................. 42 Karen Luke Jackson ................................................................................ 44 Oleg Feoktistov ........................................................................................ 45 Elizabeth Hill ............................................................................................ 46 Andrew Gent ............................................................................................. 47 Julie L. Moore ............................................................................................ 48 Alan Altany ................................................................................................ 50 Aaron Harris ............................................................................................. 52 Richard Luftig .......................................................................................... 53 Holly Day .................................................................................................... 56 Christopher Stolle ................................................................................... 57 Contributor Biographies.............................................................. 63
Tipton Poetry Journal Summer 2022
[This
LizzyKePolishan You are a watermelon seed a hard dark thing I’m scared to swallow, scared it will grow somethinginto h u g e inside againstmemy will. * * * I grow until it looks like I’ve swallowed a watermelon whole & I love you the way a watermelon seed loves a watermelon: in the tiny dark seed, the light of the watermelon l i v e s. poem first appeared in the author’s collection, A Little Book of Blooms.]
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Watermelon Light
Lizzy Ke Polishan lives in Pennsylvania and holds a BA in English and philosophy from The University of Scranton. Her work has appeared in Esprit, The Rectangle, and Mangrove. In 2017 she won the Eleanor B North Poetry Award and in 2020 she published her first collection of poetry, A Little Book of Blooms. In theory she is working on her second poetry collection, though in reality she is likely sewing an obsessive amount of dresses in trippy medieval fabrics.
Tipton Poetry Journal Summer 2022 2 Swimming MeaAndrews After Anne Sexton’s “Rowing” I have ridden with you like handmaid of ILetparched.myandMnemosyneyouhaveleftthroatitcome,mystory.wasoustedwithpurple hair, supposedly words collected from mom’s mouth but There’srecordphotosmeblonde.anightmare, a cry, a pulling on my hair from crib while a train horns by. No dolls, but a collection of dollar menu TY’s. There was school number one, with naptime I denied, eyes peeled open, stared at projector lights, missed my bus stop every day that first school year. So many Myofonfoundationsapartmentfattheinconsistencytheirtenants.momguttedone, sold plumbing, cabinets, nails out of the mybutterflytopusheddoor.everythingbaseboardsbutthefrontAndIgrew,monsterfrombedtocouchfloorcyclical,knifeunderpillow.
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And I grew past that, not rowing but swimming, dipping under waves to breathe, legs kicking me forward while memories like octopus ink ran me circular. My island savior, Education. Clawed onto Its beach of student debt; anything for above minimum wage, anything to build my own dinner table, the first of my life, sit people like rubies around it self made blood. There will be a door, I’ll make that too, and I will build a lock and I will lock it if I have to. And they won’t be able pick it with a dime they found on the ground like they did with those cheap bathroom locks.
Mea Andrews is a writer from Georgia, who currently resides in China. She has just finished her MFA from Lindenwood University and is only recently back on the publication scene. You can find her in Vermilion, Rappahannock Review, and others. You can also follow her on Instagram at mea_writes or go to her website at meaandrews.com
Tipton Poetry Journal Summer 2022
4 Mother Dreams MarySexson Every time I conjure up my mother she comes out differently. I get her as the all knowing sage and the one who screwed up my childhood. I hold her at arm’s length, ambivalent in all my feelings. She is a catalyst of dreams, the kindred spirit who did not nurture, the mother who abandoned her daughters at the same time she worked two jobs to put food on our table, bartered with the bill collectors and buried her firstborn son. She is the enigma I return to over and over, seeking her core, piecing together the puzzle, her ambiguous self, her lost soul, her pride that broke us all.
Mary Sexson lives in Indianapolis and is author of the award winning book, 103 in the Light, Selected Poems 1996 2000 (Restoration Press), and co author of Company of Women, New and Selected Poems (Chatter House Press). Her poetry has appeared in Tipton Poetry Journal, Laureate, Hoosier Lit, Flying Island, New Verse News, Grasslands Review, and Last Stanza Poetry Journal, among others. She has recent work in Reflections on Little Eagle Creek, Anti Heroin Chic, and Last Stanza Poetry Journal Issue #8. Finishing Line Press will publish her manuscript, Her Addiction, An Empty Place at the Table, in 2023. Sexson’s poetry is part of the INverse Poetry Archives for Hoosier Poets.
Finding my grandfather’s will was no easy task, the glut of paperwork I sent the clerks trailing through, the thread of his date of birth and proper middle initial the thing that got it found, and oh yeah, I remembered the name of his lawyer, who has also been dead for decades, and the year he was born, my grandfather that is, 1890, I remembered that too.How the date was stuck in my head is testament to my sister who actually was the keeper of such pertinent information during her life, like I could go to her for the middle name of great aunt Inez, and end up knowing who made the cane pole she taught me to fish with, more important, I think, than knowing my grandfather’s long dead lawyer’s name, after all.
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MarySexson
What I Really Needed to Know
Tipton Poetry Journal Summer 2022
This slamming of windows and doors this shutting out the unknown as though it were a virus or a vampire or a dastardly villain from a second rate soap opera but my basement is bursting with highchairs, tricycles, soccer cleats, luggage, year books and encyclopedias time to pare down like potato skins or better yet settle in with another bottle of brandy When they find my body blottoed in bed maybe starting to stink like Liederkranz cheese they will find slews of unopened words scattered like Lego blocks or sprinkles on a birthday cake or birdseed for sparrows who have lost their song Wobbegong, Tuvalu, Diplodocus, Muon, Aghori gather them up and give them to the younger folk whose houses still have plenty of room
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I nod sagely, not caring the slightest bit about Lysander not wanting to know whether Lysander is a fish or chocolate dessert or a city in Mali or a contagious disease wondering if this is a mark of old age, this not caring, this lack of curiosity wondering if this should be a question on cognitive tests for those of us who have slipped quietly past seventy do you say I know all about the Violin beetle when you have never heard of it
Lysander, et al ClaireScott Have you heard of Lysander he asks me
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Why wouldn’t he be? He has almost no responsibility. No bleary eyed insomnia worried about affording Adidas sneakers for his kids, so they won’t need costly therapy for fractured self esteem. No five hundred dollar Comcast bill for a WiFi that spits and sputters during Zoom calls with his cantankerous boss. No Prius needing a four thousand dollar battery in order to schlep the kids to school, to soccer, to Spanish, to swim. Precisely the same four thousand saved for a laid back summer on the beaches of Cape Cod. Sisyphus is never gobsmacked with surprises. No gophers digging up his peonies and petunias. Nothing like my son’s report card dotted with D’s. Nothing like the doctor frowning at the shadow on my MRI. Every day dittos the one before. No meals to plan, please no chicken again, I hate tofu, Talia’s mother buys Captain Crunch. His rock steadfast and stable. It doesn’t grow nose hairs and a flabby belly. It doesn’t suddenly develop an interest in learning Latin on Tuesday nights.
Sisyphus Pushes a Rock Up a Hill in Hades
Claire Scott is an award winning poet in Oakland, California who has received multiple Pushcart Prize nominations. Her work has been accepted by the Atlanta Review, Bellevue Literary Review, New Ohio Review, Enizagam and Healing Muse among others. Claire is the author of Waiting to be Called and Until I Couldn’t. She is the co author of Unfolding in Light: A Sisters’ Journey in Photography and Poetry.
ClaireScott
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Today I resigned. I simply resigned. Left a note on the table. Gone Straight to Hell. And drove to Home Depot to pick out the perfect rock.
Why would we need Camus to tell us that Sisyphus is happy?
Shoveling the Shadow
William Greenway’s 13th collection, As Long As We’re Here, is from FutureCycle Press. He has won the Helen and Laura Krout Memorial Poetry Award, the Larry Levis Editors’ Prize from Missouri Review, the Open Voice Poetry Award from The Writer's Voice, the State Street Press Chapbook Competition, an Ohio Arts Council Grant, an Academy of American Poets Prize, and was Georgia Author of the Year. Publications include Poetry, American Poetry Review, Southern Review, Missouri Review, Georgia Review, Southern Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, Poetry Northwest, and Shenandoah. Greenway is Distinguished Professor of English Emeritus at Youngstown State University, and now lives in Ephrata, Pennsylvania.
WilliamGreenway
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The little girl walking along the edges of the pool is trying, with her blue plastic shovel, to scoop up the shadow walking beside her. She is unhappy with it, and seems to be wanting to change it, rearrange it in some way into something that is not quite her, but something better. Her mother is nowhere, so I can’t compare what she will be, and wonder if she will ever be happy with what she has finally made, even if she thinks she will learn somehow what that is by looking down deep into her dark pail.
Poetry Journal Summer 2022
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Under a Starry, Starry Night
The mountains are covered with stars tonight like the world at the start of what I know is around me. I listen to the sway of the palm trees, the sounds of the familiar, company in the night for a woman alone under the thick desert sky, under mountains covered in snow, and I am trying to put a life together again with 100s of small plans and a big idea or two about saving the world and living deeply doing it if only for a moment or a year or a lifetime.
Charlene Langfur lives in Palm Springs, California, and is a southern Californian, an organic gardener, a Syracuse University Graduate Writing Fellow. Her most recent publications include poems in Emrys, Inlandia, North Dakota Quarterly, and a series of poems forthcoming in Weber The Contemporary West.
CharleneLangfur
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And now here especially when the place is as quiet as it gets and the black crows and the mountain bluebirds lie low and the smallest lizards hide under the biggest rocks and I can feel the sky and the weather on my face as if it is palpable, and I am aware of all of it as it is tonight, earth, the glow of the scrub grass in the shallow lights, the wild flowers out in the sand, crazy blue, all of them coming back for more and more no matter what tries to stop them, the way life is here, the way it comes back and back, flowering like mad, true to exactly how they are
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Tipton Poetry Journal Summer 2022
The Cathedral at Night GeorgeMoore
The doors once were always open once when worship was an ongoing thing developing like a river or the wind across the streets where no one came at night And I would sit in the hard pew the stone pillars to the great arched roof like answers to the movements of time in youth and just then after Late at night I would walk the streets looking for the reflection of the moon and catch it on the high stone steeple in the faces of the storied windows
The silence was the best of all a great space built for nothing that anyone could hear or see but only somehow feel the echo of a thought the eyes of a million gods all that dead air and one small sailess voice surrounded by the sea of silence itself surrounded by the stone that holds in the fading moment
NettieFarris
Tipton then it’s gone and out I go to sacrifice to the world with an early morning cup of coffee George Moore’s recent collections include Children’s Drawings of the Universe (Salmon Poetry 2015) and Saint Agnes Outside the Walls (FutureCycle 2016). His work has been published in The Atlantic, Poetry, North American Review, Orion, and The Colorado Review. After a career in literature and writing with the University of Colorado, Boulder, he lives on the south shore of Nova Scotia.
He finally succeeded in eliminating all of her defects. She disappeared. There were two of him. Motif NettieFarris All she wanted was a small grammatical fragment she could sit in.
Nettie Farris is the author of four chapbooks of poetry: The Alice Poems (dancing girl press, 2022), The Wendy Bird Poems (dancing girl press, 2022), Fat Crayons (Finishing Line Press, 2015) and Communion (Accents Publishing, 2013). Her reviews have appeared in Blue Lyra Review and North American Review. Her flash lyric essays have appeared in Miracle Monocle. She lives in Floyds Knobs, Indiana.
Perfection
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James Mulhern’s writing has appeared in literary journals over two hundred times and has been recognized with many awards. In 2015, Mr. Mulhern was granted a writing fellowship to Oxford University. That same year, a story was longlisted for the Fish Short Story Prize. In 2017, he was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Two of his novels were Finalists for the United Kingdom’s Wishing Shelf Book Awards. His novel, Give Them Unquiet Dreams, is a Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year. He was shortlisted for the Aesthetica Creative Writing Award 2021 for his poetry. Mulhern now lives in Florida.
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The Guard James Mulhern I sit in the pew next to the stained glass of Veronica wiping the face of Jesus. I enjoy the play of light red, gold, and green illuminations.
Jesus, a wooden cross covering his white tunic and carmine cape, bends down and speaks to Veronica, a peaceful woman in blue and white. She holds a cloth to wipe his face. What does Jesus say to her? Thank you, I suppose. The guard behind them watches. Is he a sad witness? Does he have doubts like me? Perhaps he listens, as I do, for an illumination. Or maybe he simply wants to escape the searing sun.
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Timothy Robbins has been teaching English as a Second Language for 30 years. His poems have appeared in many literary journals and has published five volumes of poetry: Three New Poets (Hanging Loose Press), Denny’s Arbor Vitae (Adelaide Books), Carrying Bodies (Main Street Rag Press) Mother Wheel (Cholla Needles Press) and This Night I Sup in Your House (Cyberwit.net). He lives in Wisconsin with his husband of 25 years.
The Insurrection TimothyRobbins He hates my insomnia even more than I do. He hates it, so I try to hide it. He hates it, so I work to convince him it’s a blessing, an imitation (albeit uninspiring) of what Helen Keller’s eyes and ears did for her sensations. His superior hate doesn’t mean he loves me more than I love myself. The eventuality I can’t accept is that my self-love is less than perfect; not a hybrid of parental love and narcissism. I will storm the Capitol of sense, break every healthy bar before I surrender belief in never ending self reelection.
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Jean RogerPfingston
Her name? Maybe. It’s what someone passed to another who passed it on to me with a shrug. True to her chosen way, everything she owns is bagged, mounded in a grocery cart, her appearance marked by the white lace shawl covering her head, the woman who stands waiting in one of her comfort zones, not openly on a corner, more of a peripheral presence. Over the years the town has accepted, even embraced her, including the City Grill where I was seated one night when I realized Jean, too, was dining at a window table down from me, gratis no doubt, her colorful basket where she could see it on the sidewalk, the waitress attentive, leaning to hear the secret of her voice before Jean resumed her mute stare. The last time I saw her wondering how she’d pulled it off was the county library, her familiar cart and shawl a slow progression moving in and out among the bookshelves, which set me to thinking of Emerson’s essay: …the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude. A worrisome note it’s been awhile, her absence my own sense of time becoming skewed as I fall prey to the body’s dark vagaries. I’m sure there are those who know her story, though I prefer the one I carry, addressing still her living silence.
Turning 80 RogerPfingston Friends kid the old poet that his lips are getting thin, no longer sexy full. He worries in the mirror that it might be true, so when he turns to his wife asking for a kiss, to see what she thinks, she says OK, but when they pucker she can’t stop giggling, says it doesn’t matter at their age, which makes him sad then mad enough to take her in his arms, à la Clark Gable, bend her back and plant one. Can’t be sure, she says, bussing his cheek. Let me think on it.
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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 latest chapbook, What's Given, is available from Kattywompus Press.
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Even Gene never went to this extreme, although I'd told him, "I am one of many who voted 'Debs' " because I liked his stand. And yet, in '12, about to end a tour and leave for home from Cherbourg, France, I planned to take the grand Titanic, lured again by lavish luxury, as when St. Ben's extravagance conveyed the essence of The Gilded Age. But hard knock lessons held: I paid my passage on a cheaper ship instead, and it delivered me from evil.
When I wrote to Eugene Debs, he was a broken man, imprisoned in the South till Warren Harding fully pardoned him on Christmas Day. I told him I was glad he's back on native grass, both his and mine. But I remember it as he recalls the jail. My father labored in a woolens mill, which made him hard and kept us poor but didn't keep him off our mom at night and drunken grunts from thundering into the crowded rooms we tried to sleep in.
MatthewBrennan
16 Theodore Dreiser: Recalling a Letter Sent to Terre Haute in 1922
Tipton Poetry Journal Summer 2022
Before we moved, I studied at St. Ben's. During Masses there, I feasted on the frescoed walls and ceiling, vaulted high above both apse and altar, stained-glass windows, and arches bearing all that weighted wealth. Religion taught me how the fat cats live. Later, excess stirred the sparks that Debs fed like a bellows, and led me to travel like a wildfire to Stalin's Russian fount.
There's a photo in a book called Lost Treasures of St. Louis, coffee table in size and never opened after Christmas. This picture centers on an eatery, the downtown Orient on Seventh, the camera angled from across the road and halfway down the block, tilted upward to include buildings rising in the background.
A Photograph, Circa 1935 MatthewBrennan
Matthew Brennan has published six books of poetry, most recently Snow in New York (Lamar U. Literary Press, 2021). He has recently published poems in Amsterdam Quarterly, THINK, Valparaiso Poetry Review, and Concho River Review. After teaching at Indiana State University for 32 years, he relocated to Columbus, Ohio.
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The restaurant's sign is dim against the shadows of the black-and-gray façade, and so the eye is drawn at first into the lower left, then lingers there on letters stretching across a van's back doors, below its window: BROADWAY LAUNDRY CO. Though incidental, this image resurrects a family anecdote: the truck was owned by Rudolph Weinert, husband to my grandmother's mom, who always bragged she never cleaned her spouse's clothes but then he died and a dark lady called the house to drop off Uncle Rudy's dirty linen, as if she'd stripped it from the bed they'd slept in.
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Rows and rows of sunflowers
One by one, That grimy darkness eradicated them As they hung their pregnant starlike heads
Closer and closer to the poisonous ground
The scorched earth cried in pain As their heads drooped Closer and closer, A comfort to the earth’s pain Laying seeds of renewal in hope That the blue sky Would once again Meet their upturned faces. Rebecca Hill lives in Bloomington, Indiana. She has been published twice in Flying Island Journal, and in the Midwest Poetry Review.
Tipton Poetry Journal Summer 2022
18 Blue Skies RebeccaHill Once when the blue sky met the horizon
Danced in the sunlight Of the blue sky. Then came the dust, The rumble of tanks, The whiz of bullets Against the brightly hewn fields Grazing the petals of the sunflowers, Knocking some of their heads from their stems And a grimy darkness Settled on the remaining petals
Jack e Lorts, a retired educator, lives in rural eastern Oregon, where he continues to publish widely, if only occassionally, online and such places as Windfall, Phantom Drift, Chiron Review, Tipton Poetry Journal, Verse Virtual & Verse Daily. His most recent book is The Love Songs of Ephram Pratt, many of which appear widely online.
The Cat’s Peace of Mind JackeLorts
“There are two means of refuge from the miseries of life: music & cats.”
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~ Albert Schweitzer
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I told her of the war in Ukraine, innocence dying. She didn’t care. I told her of George Floyd dying from Derek Chauvin’s knee on his neck. She fell asleep. Eric Garner strangled for selling cigarettes; she slept. She considers the squirrels on the birdbath, they don’t belong there. Two humming birds quarreling, she cocks her head. Bread scraps awaiting the arrival of the crows, starlings, sparrows crowding around the feeder, doves drifting down, she observes with interest. Then she sleeps. Coat hanger abortions again in vogue, corruption in the highest places. An epidemic spreads across the world, a million humans die, weekly mass murders. She ascends her stark white kitty condo, and slumbers on in peace.
At peace on top of the refrigerator or on the foot of the bed, or the left end of the sofa, her mind is on a piece of yellow silk sliding off the shelf of the bookcase, of a coke can on the table near the recliner, or an empty box lying on the floor in the kitchen.
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Poetry Journal Summer 2022
20 After Costco, Before Ukraine NoloSegundo
You saw the lines weren’t too long so you went for the gas first--spend a little time, save a lot of money you thought. But it took longer than you expected [too many ‘tanks’ as you call SUVs filling up their 50 gallon tanks] so by the time you went into the giant store, you were feeling like a crab trapped in a net as you wrestled through the weekend horde of bargain hunters…. Finally at home, you plopped down in the comfy chair as the nightly news came on and sipped the fresh brewed French roast and ate a piece of rich chocolate cake you bought at Costco and felt a bit sad for those poor people in Ukraine as you watched war in hi-def. Still, the thought uppermost in your mind, as your eyes scanned so many dead bodies lying quiet in the streets like stones thrown randomly, was just how damn good the coffee was and how much you had saved going to the big box store…. Nolo Segundo, pen name of L. J. Carber, became a published poet in his 70's in 99 literary journals in the U.S., U.K., Canada, Romania, India, and in 2 trade book collections: The Enormity of Existence [2020] and Of Ether and Earth [2021]. Both titles reflect the awareness he's had for over 50 years since having an NDE whilst almost drowning in a Vermont river: that he has is a consciousness that predates birth and survives death, what poets once called a soul. Nominated for the Pushcart Prize 2022, he's a retired teacher [America, Japan, Taiwan, Cambodia] now living in New Jersey who's been married 42 years to a smart and beautiful Taiwanese woman.
She roams the edge of a hardwood forest, her steady gaze, a mirror to my past.
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Jessica D. Thompson’s poems have appeared in numerous journals including The Southern Review, Ruminate, and The Midwest Quarterly, as well as in many anthologies such as the Women of Appalachia Project's Women Speak, Vol. 7, (Sheila Na Gig). Her first full length poetry collection, Daybreak and Deep, will be available from Kelsay Books in the Fall of 2022. Jessica lives in Evansville, Indiana.
Some would call her coyote but I prefer the name prairie wolf. When we were children, we ran in packs like young wolves, crossing weed seeded fields and dirt paths into vacant wooded lots between white framed houses. We ran until we lost our breath, until the pain in our sides stopped us— invisible arrows piercing bird like ribs. Our bones were hollow. How else could we climb trees with ease, or dare to jump from tar papered roof tops. Our grass stained feet lifted from the ground by paper kites with trailing tails born of Invincible,rags.we unfurled our laughter out into a darkening sky. This is the oldest language our tongues tasting of honey suckle and heat lightning.
21 Prairie Wolves JessicaD.Thompson
J.J.Steinfeld
People pray and pray to God or gods the world and the past full of those prayerful words colliding and colliding and a billion people still don’t win the lottery and a billion more won’t live a hundred years and your team still lost by a substantial score maybe they should pray louder or perhaps softer, more distinctly enunciate each and every word as if it contains love and humility in maybeabundancetheyshould be silent perfectly silent let the heart speak and see what happens then.
22 Deconstructing Prayer
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Poetry Journal Summer 2022
Canadian poet, fiction writer, and playwright J. J. Steinfeld lives on Prince Edward Island, where he is patiently waiting for Godot’s arrival and a phone call from Kafka. While waiting, he has published 23 books, including Identity Dreams and Memory Sounds (Poetry, Ekstasis Editions, 2014), Madhouses in Heaven, Castles in Hell (Stories, Ekstasis Editions, 2015), An Unauthorized Biography of Being (Stories, Ekstasis Editions, 2016), Absurdity, Woe Is Me, Glory Be (Poetry, Guernica Editions, 2017), A Visit to the Kafka Café (Poetry, Ekstasis Editions, 2018), and Gregor Samsa Was Never in The Beatles (Stories, Ekstasis Editions, 2019), Morning Bafflement and Timeless Puzzlement (Poetry, Ekstasis Editions, 2020), Somewhat Absurd, Somehow Existential (Poetry, Guernica Editions, 2021), and Acting on the Island (Stories, Pottersfield Press, 2022).His short stories and poems have appeared in numerous periodicals and anthologies internationally, and over 50 of his one act plays and a handful of full length plays have been performed in Canada and the United States.
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Ironing GloriaParker
It's five a.m. I'm at the ironing board, possibly asleep, and if so, when I wake, the eight pressed shirts I have on hangers will vanish and I'll have to start over or if I'm awake, I'll have spent the last hour or two, ruminating...seeing what ironies I might iron out as I try to make my life wrinkle free. What's on my mind? Ancient stuff: I'm not quite old enough to go to kindergarten and it's lunch time. I'm eating my noodles and ketchup...Mom's turning pages in a magazine and biting her cuticles. She looks up long enough to read to me about how Nazis made lampshades. I don't know what a Nazi is or if my skin is Jewish, but I do know Isdread.irony the word I'm looking for? Maybe not. So what should I call it when the person who drove me mad is shocked that I am? Was I her only audience? My brother says no... that I have to understand...even a continent away, WW2 happened only to her. But it's 2022, and I'm standing at an ironing board before dawn, still stuck in the forties.
Gloria Parker is a retired primary school teacher living in Pennsylvania. Her poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Margie, Slipstream, Paterson Literary Review, Gyroscope, Rattle, North Dakota Quarterly, Nimrod, Black Coffee Review, Loch Raven Review and elsewhere.
Vicki Iorio is the author of the poetry collections Poems from the Dirty Couch (Local Gems Press), Not Sorry (Alien Buddha Press) and the chapbooks Send Me a Letter (dancinggirlpress) and Something Fishy (Finishing Line Press). Her poetry has appeared in numerous print and on line journals including The Painted Bride Quarterly, Rattle, poets respond on line, The Fem Lit Magazine, and The American Journal of Poetry. Vicki is currently living in Florida but her heart is in New York.
My daughter, fairy tale princess in crystals and peau de soie breaks my heart.
I always blame everything on her father’s family. The spear side his sickly father, his crazy mother. We don’t have scoliosis in our family, my mother says when I tell her the diagnosis. Until her bones fuse my daughter wears a brace all through high school that cages her like Scout in her Halloween ham costume.
24 Guilty VickiIoro
At Kleinfeld’s while my daughter is being fitted for her wedding gown Olga, the scary Russian seamstress, her mouth full of pins, tells me my daughter is crooked.
My daughter’s doctor carries a Chanel bag I promise my daughter I will buy her one when her years of treatment are done, as if I can afford this luxury.
Poetry Journal Summer
Bones fused, college bound with her Chanel bag, I make a planter of the cage to memorialize the curve.
The doctor says my daughter’s curved spine is pressing on her heart the way she pressed on mine when she was inside me. 10 years-old, sitting on the crinkly examination table she looks at me like this is my fault.
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Poetry Journal Summer 2022
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Cecil Morris, retired after 37 years of teaching high school English, now tries writing himself what he spent so many years teaching others to understand and (maybe) enjoy. He likes ice cream too much and cruciferous vegetables too little for his own good. He has had a handful of poems published in 2River View, Cobalt Review, English Journal, The Ekphrastic Review, Evening Street Review, The Midwest Quarterly, Poem, and other literary magazines. He lives in Roseville, California.
25 Seeing Aging My Father's Bruises
CecilMorris Purple-black bruises float on my father's skin like boats moored on the tiny, nameless atolls of scabs he doesn't remember from the war he won't talk about. His bruises look like a blood splatter Rorschach from crime TV as if he were there in the spray of murder and had not bothered to shower evidence away, had kept these badges of work completed until their red had dried the brown black of old car grease. My father's bruises stop me like a traffic cop issuing citations and orders to appear. They scare me when I see them and haunt me when I leave, my imagination filled with accidents and spills, his mottled body broken on the linoleum in the kitchen or outside fallen under the mandarin tree, the ladder kicked over as he stretched to reach the highest fruit, the orange globes I couldn't reach and would have let spoil. The Big Bang has become a whimper and the whole universe shrinks around him, around us, diminishing possibilities pulling us together, compression of hard knocks and limitations that will lead us to a single place, the singular collapse of the one star I have orbited.
This morning while getting ready, I saw that mole again. The one I'd had removed years ago. The one that was there when I was eight when you told me to run from the house in my yellow nightgown the daisies stitched like a handmade necklace around its yoke trimmed with lace. You were angry with me then, I wasn't dressed, my hair unbrushed and knotted with curl. Outside a tiny bird lay on the pavement, I watched as its wings gleamed in sunlight, emerald blue and turquoise, its body working hard like a fine machine pumping it over and over again, with some intangible thing called hope, one eye open, the other smashed against the cement. I wondered if it knew death was calling it home. To die alone I thought, must be worse than living without love, for something so final to be left unshared, to lie on the coldness of the unknown, await your last breath imbued with a second cruelty, the scent of jasmine wafting near your lungs, inhaling one final time just to keep the fragrance of life inside you like a consolation for letting go. I felt compelled to stay there, to say no to you, so I could pause beside that little bird until it was emptied of air but you said come quick, come quick before your father finds us. That mole was just a blemish on my face back then, a place
CarolLynnStevensonGrellas
Tipton Poetry Journal Summer 2022 26 A Letter to my Mother
Tipton
Poetry Journal Summer 2022
27 where tears would roll and exaggerate its size. I would remove it when I was twenty five, my then new husband asking the doctor to cut it off a silver scalpel in his right hand when he said, what it must be to ask someone so young to eliminate a piece of them, to see their own skin as a flaw rather than a mark of beauty. It made you cry when I told you what happened. That marriage was doomed from the start, but being feminine in those days meant being willing to endure what was asked. That little bird must have heard my father firing his gun, an interruption in the calm, a reason to fly into glass thinking the sky was a mirror instead of a window, where I stood as you yelled at me for my tardiness, for my indecency of forgetting underwear as if I should have known better, to always be prepared for the day your father comes after you with a gun, or to have the choice not to run when a little bird might be startled in the midst of pandemonium, as if it was only waiting not to be alone, or for me to place a chrysanthemum leaf beneath one wing, and touch it with my fingertip, defying you when you said, come quick. And just today that mole has appeared again, like a marker or an asterisk on skin, so I'd remember when I look at my reflection to always hear you calling me and to be there for the little bird nearing unfettered space to next time pick it up, pick it up and cradle it against my face.
Carol Lynn Stevenson Grellas lives in the Sierra Foothills of Califoria. She studied at Santa Clara University, where she was an English major. She is an eight time Pushcart nominee, a five time Best of the Net nominee and the author of the following collections of poetry: Epistemology of an Odd Girl, Hasty Notes in No Particular Order, Letters Under the Banyan Tree, The Wanderer’s Dominion, Breakfast in Winter, and the winning chapbook in The Red Ochre Chapbook Contest, Before I Go to Sleep. Her work has appeared in: The Yale Journal for Humanities in Medicine, Poets and Artists, War, Literature and the Arts. She is the Assistant Editor for The Orchards Poetry Journal and a member of the Sacramento group of poets called Writers on Air. According to family lore, she is a direct descendant of Robert Louis Stevenson. www.clgrellaspoetry.com
Tipton
CarolLynnStevensonGrellas
28 Bedroom Mugwump
I’d ask you for a cigarette but I don’t smoke and it’s not very sexy to hold an unlit roll-up between my fingers. You on the other hand are very suggestive laying there all hair mussed and topless; your chest covered in sweat. I’ve always found you most attractive when you’re angry. I know it’s not right to admit that kind of thing. But there’s something beautiful about the way your upper lip curls and your eyes twitch when you’re on the verge of swearing at me and I give up my bitch face which I think turns you on too. So let’s not argue about who’s better at playing this game. Let’s agree to disagree so I can roll my eyes and undress with my most tempting scowl in front of the evening window. I’ll wait for a few curse words and see what happens with the moonlight as our flare.
Poetry Journal Summer 2022
Tipton Poetry Journal Summer 2022 29 The Filigree of Life BruceLevine Engraved in the midnight sky The stars and planets Outline the universe Projecting the future Onto the darkened screen of night Millennia of patterns Recorded by history As the boundaries reshape the zodiac Forecasting evolution As light-years draft schematics Of time past and time to be told Stories in a melting pot Of liquid iron Molded into bars like a skeleton To be wrought by a blacksmith Into the filigree of life Bruce Levine has spent his life as a writer of fiction and poetry and as a music and theatre professional. A 2019 Pushcart Prize Poetry nominee, a 2021 Spillwords Press Awards winner, the Featured Writer in WestWard Quarterly Summer 2021 and his bio is featured in “Who’s Who of Emerging Writers 2020.” Bruce has over three hundred works published on over twenty five on line journals including Ariel Chart, Spillwords, The Drabble; in over seventy print books including Poetry Quarterly, Haiku Journal, Tipton Poetry Journal; Halcyon Days Founder’s Favourites (on line and print) and his shows have been produced in New York and around the country. His work is dedicated to the loving memory of his late wife, Lydia Franklin. A native Manhattanite, Bruce now lives and writes in Maine. Visit him at www.brucelevine.com
30 Star Balloons BenjaminNash
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Poetry Journal Summer 2022
It will soon be raining heavily on all of us, a man sat in his car with the hood up, cardboard box on top, a trailer in back, by a thrift store, the juvenile detention center, the grocery store that they are in the process of tearing down, and the bank where I deposited a check, it might be because of the high rents, they moved the grocery store to the old vacant strip mall, the neon orange scissors no longer cutting, open, close, in one store, and I saw a woman there with yellow, red, and white star balloons, a security guard in black watched her get into her car with her groceries, in Uvalde, a small town south of here, a teenage boy shot and killed several small children in an elementary school, what if we explode into yellow, red, and white pieces when we die, as if confetti, we are put back together in another place, we find that everything is better there, children reunite with their parents again, are loved, on the way home I saw a girl walking in the wrong direction from the high school, a man waiting for the bus, a woman asking for money at the intersection, and it started to rain a little,
“Aren’t we all?” He stays mum and still. I pat the rainwater up, offer him a smile.
Stephanie Keep is a writer living in Montana. Her poetry practice has come as a welcome surprise borne of long walks, first along the streets of San Francisco and now on the trails of her native Mountain West. In every creative venture, she's looking for interesting, not perfect.
Journal Summer
Benjamin Nash lives in Austin, Texas. His poems have been published in Louisiana Literature, 2River, Pembroke Magazine, Concho River Review, and other publications.
Tipton Poetry 2022
31 I think the star balloons were for a birthday party, yellow, red, and white candles on top, maybe a new pink bicycle, a mother worried about her daughter.
Opening StephanieKeep
The wind has come up again. It presses at my windows and seeps silky through earthquake caused cracks. A slow drip of rainwater pooling on the windowsill inside. In the morning the sun will weakly glow through fat drops I shake from my shades. I like to let a little outside in. When a spider creeps across aandwallinto a corner crouches by my bed I converse, or try he’s just passing through.
A daughter on each side of the slim, white bed, telling why he can’t rip the IV needle out, relieve its throbbing pinch. We hold his hands, remind him, he’s in hospital, has fallen.
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Jill Michelle's latest poems appear/are forthcoming in DMQ Review, Eclectica Magazine, Gyroscope Review, Bacopa Literary Review and Drunk Monkeys. Recent anthology credits include The Book of Bad Betties (Bad Betty Press, UK) and Words from the Brink (Arachne Press Limited, UK). She teaches at Valencia College in Orlando, Florida. Find more of her work at byjillmichelle.com.
Dad wakes up, has forgotten where he is, what’s happened.
32 The Long Goodnight JillMichelle for Diana
Dad wakes up, has forgotten where he is, what’s happened.
Poetry Journal Summer 2022
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Please, we know it hurts, but the doctor says you need it. Each time he drifts back from his sea of sleep, we restart he can’t rip the IV needle out, relieve its throbbing pinch. Please, we know it hurts, but the doctor says you need it
A daughter on each side of the slim, white bed, telling why but he doesn’t understand, has become a toddler again, so we hold his hands, remind him, he’s in hospital, has fallen try to pry him from Alzheimer’s grip, explain it to him but he doesn’t understand, has become a toddler again, so each time he drifts back from his sea of sleep, we restart try to pry him from Alzheimer’s grip, explain it to him.
Poetry Journal Summer 2022
33 Highway One DavidVancil
Tipton
I remember riding on it serenely in my jeep, marveling how beautiful it was to traverse its surface, feeling splendid and magnanimous and good as if sailing on an opaque sea.
When the North advanced and the South fell back, I was back in my own world, squirreling away a new life. I was home in my house, feeling snug and safe. Yet, I watched on the TV with dread as the conquerors advanced on Highway One in trucks and borrowed tanks. Those who fled ahead did not blow up the highway and left bridges untouched behind them as they raced away on motorbikes, in cars, and by foot. Highway One held. It carried them all, with no regard for right or wrong. Even in this moment of disappointment and angst, I felt pride in what the engineers had wrought, no matter the outcome: Something stood from our meddling and care, the bluster of precious, red spilled blood. I could think and say, We are builders of highways, makers of nations.
Maybe it was the best thing we did in Vietnam, building a highway which sprouted in Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City now) and spread north to south on smooth black asphalt, unfolding like a ribbon. It was named One (= good) and not Ten (= bad). Oh, yes, it was a thing of beauty and source of pride.
Anyone who knew tactics wondered why our enemy never blew it up, not once, and left the bridges intact.
David Vancil is retired from the faculty of Indiana State University. His work has appeared in small periodicals, critical reviews, and a few anthologies. As well, he is the author of four poetry collections. War and Its Discontents, a collection of military poems centered on family service and his own time in the U.S. Army, will be published by Angelina River Press sometime in 2022. He is at work on a collection of new and selected poems, which he hopes to publish no later than 2023. David lives in Terre Haute, Indiana, with his wife, three cats, and a dog.
At McDonald’s window table, Lincoln Cent scribes ballpoint paths above lines of wire bound tablet, secrets of the Universe. Lincoln Cent, color of copper alloy, man of no means but a Section 8 room in building badly renovated, awaiting federal loan period to expire and open way for a killing, remake of bricks and ceilings for people with the American dream.
34
GeorgeFreek (After Su Tung Po) She walks down the street, her nose in the air, like a duchess at a fair. I stare at her over a flowerpot. I no longer have a wife to make me stop. Day gives way to night. The moon reveals murky schemes. but who can understand what they mean? I drink a glass of wine. I drink another. I face the fact that my fun is done. I’m seventy one.
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Poetry Journal Summer 2022
The Moon No Longer Speaks to Me
Lincoln Cent PatrickT.Reardon
George Freek is a poet/playwright living in Belvidere, Illionois. George Freek's poetry appears in numerous Journals and Reviews. His poem "Written At Blue Lake" was recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize. His collection Melancholia is published by Red Wolf Editions.
I was Catholic school kid in dark brown tie, light brown shirt. I am here, recording enigmas at this table. Someone has to do it. In his room, Lincoln Cent has 20 tablets dense with dark data and statistics of light. Each morning, he orders black coffee and an Egg McMuffin. Each morning, he sits here he wears clean clothes from 7:15 to 10:45 when he arises from his bench for the 1.3-mile walk to the Broadway McDonald’s, his tablet in a frayed Dominick’s bag. I weary sometimes of the work.
He sees those who will come then, running sidewalks now in few clothes. He needs several layers: I keep my head down and keep my left arm across tablet top to block McDonald’s wanderers from spying inestimable ciphered testimony.
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Poetry Journal Summer 2022
Patrick T. Reardon, a three time Pushcart Prize nominee living in Chicago, is the author of ten books, including the poetry collection Darkness on the Face of the Deep (Kelsay Books). Forthcoming in 2022 are his memoir in prose poems Puddin’: The Autobiography of a Baby (Third World) and his chapbook The Lost Tribes (Gray Book).
35
The Tongan couple are pleased to show off their white cottage with the yellow trim. It is dim and cramped inside but its makeshift hillside patio offers superb views of the town. They welcome us with a cool drink. She produces a photograph of her son, brown skin with an impish grin, in a gold gilt frame. He’s working in a hotel in London, she says. The man asks how long we plan to be in Tonga and how we like it so far. From what we’ve seen, it is a collection of red rooftops and a better life elsewhere. We tell him we like it just fine.
Poetry Journal Summer 2022
John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident now living in Rhode Island, recently published in Sheepshead Review, Stand, Poetry Salzburg Review and Hollins Critic. Latest books, Leaves On Page, Memory Outside The Head and Guest Of Myself are available through Amazon. Work upcoming in Ellipsis, Blueline and International Poetry Review.
Tipton
Why Can You Not Evict Her?
Karpman’s Deli was supposed to close at six pm on July 6th, 1944 , in Harford Connecticut, but just as the close sign was being turned, Joseph Cohen literally stuck his brown wingtip in the door and said “I hate to put you out but I’ve had it on my list all day to get that Reuben.”
RosemaryFreedman
36 News from Abroad JohnGrey
Tipton
Poetry Journal Summer 2022
Dark as you slept on starched sheets, she would wake you at 4am to re vacuum the white carpet that with every swipe of the floor hummed “You’re not good enough.” I love you despite the apartment she still occupies in your frontal cortex, with her purple couch and an Edison bulb the size of a small Xanax where her crooked hands wake you every time she dozes off and spills her drink.
Rosemary Freedman is a poet, a painter and an advanced practice nurse. She has 7 children and lives in Noblesville, Indiana with her husband Jack. Rosemary enjoys growing peonies and tending her large garden. She is a graduate of Indiana University. Rosemary is currently working toward her masters of fine arts in poetry at Butler University.
37 Little Dolores sat watching with her white gloves full of anger, because this would make her late to the circus. When they arrived they saw the place ablaze and the interruption meant the death toll stood at 167, and Dolores and her father were late. Despite that Dolores still went on hating being late. When she grew up she bought new pillows on July 6th every year. I slept on the same hard pillow until I was about 18, goose feathers mixed with sweat, and who knows what. Husband, son of Dolores, I know you had soft pillows, but that likely your only comfort. No kind words. I apologize for trying to fill in your narrative. But I swear your mother pulled your thick hair.
Tipton Poetry Journal Summer 2022
StewartMintzer
The Phd candidate from New York says he hates list poems but mine is tolerable. He says that clearly the poem is about relationship and beneath its weak current there’s a darkness and the clumsy tenderness of the speaker is juxtaposed with an obsession having to do with experience and not with knowledge. I sink lower in my chair head fuzzying as he goes on to say that the reference to balding shows the inquiring poetry postulates remain intact but paradoxically make the piece a utopian undertaking that riddles itself with its own complaints. Some of the others nod and the Tibetan Buddhist from Boulder who’s been sitting with her eyes shut, hands on her heart, whispers that despite the pedestrian nature of the poem the words trousers and ketchup remind her of a tanka and ripple like pebbles dropped a thousand feet in a glacial lake.
38 Critique at the Poetry Workshop
Poetry Journal Summer 2022
39
[This poem was first published by the Portland Review]
Stewart Mintzer lives in the Los Angeles area and his poems have appeared in several online and print journals. He is presently working on ‘The Permission Slip Project,” exploring ways to encourage and invite, image, sound, and ‘medicine’ in this sweet bruising Mystery of a Life.
Finally the instructor steps in and says the poem is like a child learning about the Great War. It communicates an enormous amount of pain in a dissonant way. While it does have a small heart the words are not right-brained and convey a certain amount of suspicion through a series of formal devices that give doubt about the adequacy of its own material. He calls the second stanza psychic gloss and wants to know how I justify its existence with the panty hose reference.
Tipton
The therapist from Seattle pats her mumbleshair,something about Maslow’s hierarchy and says she likes the temporal dynamic and the reference to the elevator that was somewhat sexual but with a touch of anger that sparks the shift into the hint of an authoritative adulthood. The Phd Candidate snorts that the part about the Italian waiter was a reference to Janus, the God of doorways, and that the word spaghetti created space by dictional tension.
As soon as she hung up, I reinstalled the photos.
One by one, I deleted the pictures, while my daughter, sitting next to me on the bed in the hotel room, confirmed it to my sister.
AnneWhitehouse I Sister Three was on the phone, and she was outraged. Sister Two had told her about the photos I had taken that afternoon of our mother lying dead in the open casket in the viewing room of the funeral home. Sister Three scolded me for my lack of respect and demanded I delete the pictures. She said Sisters One and Two agreed with her. We each have our own ways of grieving, I wanted to say, but I was too spent to argue.
Smuggled Images
“It’s none of her business,” I told my daughter. “These photos are precious to me.”
“All right,” I said, “I’ll do it.”
40
“Okay,” she replied, mollified. I could see she’d been prepared for an argument I hadn’t given her.
Tipton Poetry Journal Summer 2022
Anne Whitehouse’s recent poetry collection is Outside from the Inside (Dos Madres Press, 2020), and her recent chapbook is Escaping Lee Miller (Ethel Zine and Micro Press, 2021).. Anne is also the author of a novel, Fall Love, and she has been publishing a series of essays about Edgar Allan Poe. She lives in New York City and Columbia County, New York. www.annewhitehouse.com
41 II
Nearly ten years after my mother’s death, I stare at these last images of her. She died soon after her cancer diagnosis. She had no time to waste away. In my pictures she is lying tranquilly against the white silk lining of the casket. Her eyes are closed, her face is made up, and her hair arranged. She looks like herself, and yet not like herself. She is wearing a dress of navy blue velvet, and her hands are folded.
Tipton
On her left wrist is a silver link bracelet made by Sister One. I recall the mortician wringing his hands, speaking softly with the right note of sadness, yet clearly proud of his handiwork and eager for us to see what he had done. An impulse made me take the photos after he left the room. Even though I knew I never could solve the mystery of my mother, I knew I would want to keep these images close to my heart.
Poetry Journal Summer 2022
Sharon Lopez Mooney, began writing in ’76, a few years later, she was given a CAC Grant for rural poetry series. Soon after, she co published a local anthology; co owned an alternative literature service; produced poetry readings. She has retired from Interfaith Chaplaincy in the ‘death & dying’ field, now lives in Sonora, Mexico, visits Northern California family. Mooney’s poems are in many publications such as: Glassworks, Avalon Literary Review, Galway Review, Ginosko Literary Journal, California Quarterly, Chicago Memory House, Ricochet Review, Roundtable Literary Journal, and various anthologies: CALYX; Cold Lake; Smoke & Myrrors (UK), nationally & internationally. More poems at: www.sharonlopezmooney.com
Mustang Muscle MichaelKeshigian Life was never measured in weeks or months back in those days. Time passed in miles per gallon or the odometer reading
Tipton Poetry 2022
42 Northern California fire season
SharonLopezMooney a thirst deep, no longer sated like brush growing brown on hillsides, waits silently for rain that won’t come a burning heat smolders struggling to melt you back to me, memories of you tremble in waves around me with ghostly images of your long fingers barely brushing a kiss onto my bare skin now is the cosmic change we've failed to stop, no more moisture to nourish the hills to feed our intimacies our thirst festers, consuming us new growth dies, passions and trees wilt i lay on a hillside waiting with the scrub for what will never return
Journal Summer
Michael Keshigian had his fourteenth poetry collection, What To Do With Intangibles, recently released in January, 2020 by Cyberwit.net. He has been published in numerous national and international journals and has appeared as feature writer in twenty publications with 7 Pushcart Prize and 2 Best Of The Net nominations. He lives in New Hampshire. (michaelkeshigian.com)
Tipton Poetry Journal 2022
Summer
43 which gauged the distance to your girlfriend’s house a certain number of miles away. Your best buddy might use his car on trips to the beach because it did better on gas. That ‘69 Mach I Mustang, my wheels for years, a loser for mileage, though it sure could attract the girls, poised defiantly in red rust garb defined with black detail, proud gold insignia stretching broadside, oversized tires, custom magnesium rims and temperamental black vinyl bucket seats alternately produced pounds of static electricity or sweat depending on the season helped me lose my virginity in the cramped back not even fit for sitting. Even did a doober or two while she guzzled petrol at the stop light. Could hear her coming a mile down the road, 351 engine roared proudly to announce her brawny entrance with shark like features shearing the wind before anyone ever considered drag coefficient. The spoilers deflected unnecessary impedance as the hood scoop proudly displayed Mustang machismo. She lived a long life almost 130,000 miles, not bad for a Ford, finally succumbing to cancer which devoured her shell and chassis providing an ignominious conclusion for a true muscle car back when time was measured in miles per gallon or the distance to your girlfriend’s house.
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Poetry Journal Summer 2022
44 Frozen Music KarenLukeJackson Baffled in high school geometry by isosceles triangles, algebraic formulas and a theorem Pythagoras handed down to students, I had no clue mathematics and music share a pattern of perfect intervals, ratios used to design vaults and chancels in Gothic cathedrals and Cistercian abbeys, lilting columns of draped stone, frozen music. Too young then, ears deaf to the clefs, anatomy and overtones that loosen ligaments, wobble bones, evoke pain or bliss depending upon how jarring or sublime the fatal kiss.
Karen Luke Jackson, author of The View Ever Changing, 2021, and GRIT, 2020, draws inspiration from contemplative practices, nature, family stories, and clowning. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals, including Ruminate, Broad River Review (Ron Rash Poetry Award), Atlanta Review, One, Redheaded Stepchild, and Kestrel. Karen resides in a cottage on a goat pasture in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina www.karenlukejackson.com
Oleg Feoktistov is a teacher at a local high school in Odesa, Ukraine. Oleg teaches English language and literature. His class is a special place where thirty kids learn, play, and get ready for life.
Tipton Poetry Journal Summer 2022 45 Sea
We spent time by the sea, TwoUnawarekids of our differences. We chased green lizards on the sandy slopes by the cliffs, Many escaped. One day she busted her knee on a wave breaker. The wave took us into the sea, She bled and cried. We swam back and almost drowned. We never told anyone Of what happened.
OlegFeoktistov
A wolf appears. Places his sure smile six inches from my face. He beguiles me with superfluous words. I feel my own elastic lust, and reveal The usual: my name, where I go with my basket, some friends he might know. He leaves. I walk on and fantasize: wide mouth, shoulders… and of course, his eyes. It is so good to see him instead of her sad, fetid body in bed. I ask him (thrilled, willing) why his mouth is bigger than hers (want this). I untie my tight shoes as I hear: “The better to eat you with, my dear”. A man bursts in he has a gun shoots my red wolf and now he opens the closet to find the source of moans: Grandma. I chose not to hear. My own body was moaning more loudly. And I do not want this boy scout huntsman.
Tipton 2022
Elizabeth Hill’s poetry has been/is soon to be published in 34th Parallel Magazine, Blue Lake Review, Last Stanza Poetry Journal, and I 70 Review, among other journals. She is a retired Administrative Law Judge who decided suits between learning disabled children and their school systems. She lives in Harlem, New York City, with her husband and two irascible cats.
Poetry Journal Summer
46 Red Riding Hood ElizabethHill The forest is languorous. It basks, flickers, glows warm with sun has no tasks.
Sinker AndrewGent
Tipton Poetry Journal Summer 2022 47
It's the thanslowerapproachingpitchphysics would allow only to drop out of reach of a perfectly timed bottom of the ninth out of the park grand slam.
Bamboozled by the obvious, you begin to doubt your senses. If you could see it coming (you ask) why didn't you get out of the way? You are the happy victim. One minute, walking down the street the next minute, ecstatic. There's no excuse for the pastimes of the smallest creatures: the fisherman, sitting in a boat alert and unrewarded long after common sense calls him in and the fish who hears the splash, sees the gaudy improbable lure, knows better, but swallows it hook line and Andrew Gent was born in England, grew up in Ohio, and now lives in New Hampshire where he works as an information architect. His first book, [explicit lyrics], won the Miller Williams Poetry prize and is available from the University of Arkansas Press.
Tipton Poetry Journal Summer 2022 48 Devil’s Backbone JulieL.Moore America! America! God mend thine every flaw. ~ Katherine Lee Bates Driving along the devil’s backbone, I’m running late this October morning, as the country road’s hills & dips send my stomach rising & falling like an empire oh, okay, no, not that sensational, but still the news on the radio reports how one white man running for U.S. Senate next door on Ohio’s fruited plain rants against CRT, tweeting, even, at the children of Martin Luther King, Jr. that he knows better than they what thoroughfare of brotherhood their father beat for freedom. Amid such noise from this less than noble nation, a beautiful squirrel darts from amber underbrush along the Ion&hurryThisIwhenOnce,notmysky,beneathforYearbeforecampaignsmargins,forspacemyGoodtires.It’snomatchmyspeedherethespaciousmyblueCRV,alabasterhandsJesusatthewheel.inanotherlife,Ilivedinthatstate,votedforthatguy.morning,Iammorethanheedful,crushtheruralspineHoosiermacadam.triedtoavoidit,
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49 but I am more than complicit. Forever separated from its shadow that used to follow its body ascending the oaks & maples now shedding their leaves, does the squirrel cry on impact though no one hears it, not even me since Green Day’s now blaring on the radio? Charlatans, the candidate called Bernice King & Martin Luther King III, who lost their dad to a patriot dream, dimmed by endless tears. Can you hear the sound of hysteria? Billie Joe Armstrong retorts. I ruminate as I go, muttering aloud to no one like what else? an idiot, blood under my nails like dirt because once upon a time, I was born into this supposed jubilee, because I can’t seem to stop the killing. A Best of the Net and seven time Pushcart Prize nominee, Julie L. Moore is the author of four poetry collections, including, most recently, Full Worm Moon, which won a 2018 Woodrow Hall Top Shelf Award and received honorable mention for the Conference on Christianity and Literature's 2018 Book of the Year Award. A previous contributor to Tipton Poetry Journal, Moore has also published poetry in African American Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Image, New Ohio Review, Poetry Daily, Prairie Schooner, The Southern Review, and Verse Daily. She is the Writing Center Director at Taylor University in Upland, Indiana, where she is also the poetry editor for Relief Journal. Learn more about her work at julielmoore.com.
Poetry Journal Summer 2022
“… I had not thought death had undone so many, Sighs,, short and infrequent, were exhaled, And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.” ~T.S. Eliot (“Wasteland,” 1922)
Tipton Poetry Journal Summer 2022
Death of hoping and the gaming of high-tech delusions of grandeur are the wobbly still points for today’s baleful postmodern profanity of culture & consciousness where distracted & habitual sighs frequently shadow one another, one century after the Wasting of the Great War and Spanish Flu, in flim-flamming the undone soul. We are newly wasted today, ecstasy is cheapened to abuse, sacred music goes flimsy & silent, and the falcon remains deaf while the center is a black hole.
50 A Century After “Wasteland” AlanAltany
Generations have passed away, yet where is the knowledge lost in a nanosecond’s super computing, the wisdom lost in finally configuring our genome? The worst are full of gnawing intensity while the best accused of hateful minds, nihilistic schemers are the chosen ones with everything relative with raw power; hope is a dystopian fallacy of heart, the dawn continuously reverts to dusk. Unreality has undone so many so much that they cannot bear to dare to hear beyond their incredulous resignation the slightest thunder of any theophany.
We are where we were & have not yet been where many go senile soon after birth, beauty is blown up, truth goes unloved, hooded hordes silently scream, and God waits to turn a handful of dust into a new grail quest for this grotesque age.
Poetry Journal Summer 2022 51
Tipton
[This poem was first published in Alan Altany’s A Beautiful Absurdity]
Alan Altany, Ph.D., lives in Florida and is a septuagenarian college professor of religious studies. He’s been a factory worker, swineherd on a farm, hotel clerk, lawn maintenance worker, small magazine of poetry editor, director of religious education for churches, truck driver, novelist, etc. He published a book of poetry in 2022 entitled A Beautiful Absurdity. His website is at https://www.alanaltany.com/.
52 Quest AaronHarris
Confusion is the ruler of my mind; It cloaks my soul in dark uncertain night. So now to quest, my hidden self to find. And now no longer to my fate consigned, I rail against my self made prison tight. Confusion is the ruler of my mind.
Long past now are the days of life most blind, Days when I ran and hid my soul in fright. But now to quest, my hidden self to find. All mortals think that they are good, are kind. But when I strip illusion from the right, Confusion is the ruler of my mind.
Poetry Journal Summer 2022
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There, in the dark, I found myself made blind. But then in love did one my heart give light And now I quest, my hidden self to find. My search will take a life and more of time; A lifetime not to know oneself aright. Confusion is the ruler of my mind. Then now to quest, my hidden self to find.
Aaron Harris graduated from Grinnell College and works as a software engineer in .Minneapolis.
But Einstein never endured my high school physics class that could turn a fifty minute period into eternity as I who (as my teacher so often told me) did not know a fulcrum from a rugby scrum, a hypotenuse from a hippopotamus, wished time to do its thing and pass. But it just inched forward, through the black hole of my adolescence, past not being cool enough to get a date, past the singularity that led me right through to invisibility.
Relativity RichardLuftig
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Tipton Poetry Journal Summer 2022
The faster one travels in the universe the more time must slow down. Albert Einstein General Law of Relativity.
Teenagers telling me (repeatedly)how clueless I was, they, lost outside our gravitational grasp and me, a fading star, energy evermore spent with every passing breath. Now I look back at a galaxy of regrets, people I hurt, things I wished I could fix, like an astronaut who knows how to make repairs on a ship speeding past the moon. But again, like so many times before, I close my eyes, hear Albert’s voice, German accent and all, steady as Venus holding its course in the early morning sky. Don’t worry, he whispers. Don’t worry. The universe rushes away even as we speak. It always has. It always will. And no regret is ever allowed to travel faster than the speed of thought.
Light years of college that continued the path then miraculously, marriage, my sweet wife and I two pulsars orbiting one another in a universal dance. Fatherhood with babies growing into toddlers when I wasn’t looking.
Tipton Poetry Journal Summer 2022
RichardLuftig Yes, I know it’s called a murder, but all of the principle suspects in the case have been seen hanging around these windbreak trees seemingly forever, deliberating among themselves about which fields of corn to invade and how best to hustle and steal off with their ill gotten gains right under the noses of straw-leaked scarecrows and faded plastic owls hired who knows when to keep the culprits away.
54 A Caucus of Crows
The farmers who left this land long ago learned at their peril how these crows have always been part of this place, its history, its DNA, like the rocks in the soil and the red clay that turns to gumbo each spring and never has yielded a decent crop. Now these caucus thieves, high in their trees, make such perfect gossips. They congregate in the branches like pickpockets searching for easy marks, holding court over orphan farmhouses riddled with broken windows and out of plum doors, splintered porches and bare poles in front yards driven
Tipton Poetry 2022
Journal Summer
Richard Luftig is a former professor of educational psychology and special education at Miami University in Ohio now residing in California. He is a recipient of the Cincinnati Post Corbett Foundation Award for Literature. His poems have appeared in numerous literary journals in the United States and internationally in Canada, Australia, Europe, and Asia. His latest book of poems, A Grammar for Snow, has been published by Unsolicited Press.
55 into the ground, perhaps once holding up blue painted birdhouses where wrens and sparrows left long ago complaining over their living conditions being not up to code. And the barns and out buildings, riddled with mice, possums, the occasional hog nosed snake, all left to fend for themselves, cold in the winter, almost brought to boil in humid Indiana summer, having always to worry about northern harriers and great wood owls but allowed nevertheless, to reside rent free and proving again how squatters can’t always be choosers.
My husband bought a sofa so low to the ground I couldn’t hide under it, there was no way to slip under it I could barely even slide a slip of paper under it. I asked him why we got a sofa so close to the ground and he said it was more stable that way, I wasn’t sure if he was talking about the sofa or the overall atmosphere in our house or just me.
Holly Day’s writing has recently appeared in Analog SF, The Hong Kong Review, and Appalachian Journal, and her recent book publications include Music Composition for Dummies, The Tooth is the Largest Organ in the Human Body, and Bound in Ice. She lives in Minneapolis and teaches creative writing at The Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis and Hugo House in Seattle.
Poetry Journal Summer 2022
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56 No Place to Hide HollyDay
Poetry is: ChristopherStolle conversations I have with my alter egos how I share my tweets without character limits the priest to whom I confess everyone else’s sins historical sketches of memories of people in my family tree where I store my collections of dreams, foul balls, and concert T shirts what happens when you’re not very good at math a place where my father can figure himself out where I decide the length of the words in my Wordles why I still have hope in the soul and love in the heart the paper towels I use when I spill the dictionaries
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Christopher Stolle’s writing has appeared most recently in Tipton Poetry Journal, Flying Island, Last Stanza Poetry Journal, The New Southern Fugitives, The Alembic, Gravel, The Light Ekphrastic, Sheepshead Review, and Plath Poetry Project. He’s an editor for DK Publishing and he lives in Richmond, Indiana
Tipton Poetry Journal Summer 2022 58 Review: Shopping Cart Dreams by Gene Twaronite ReviewedbyBarryHarris Title: Shopping Cart Dreams Author: Gene Twaronite Year: Publisher:2022 Kelsay Books
Gene Twaronite offers a mix of free verse, sonnets, sestinas, prose poems and ekphrastic poetry which invite us to look at life through different Hislenses.prose poem, “A Street Named Wherever,” warns about “what happens when you do things automatically” and you stop seeing what is actually around you. During a five o’clock walk, the poet notices a crack in the sidewalk rapidly widening into a deep gorge with blue river far below. He peers inside the gorge and observes a suddenly different world.
Twaronite entices us with clever poems that deliver unexpected takes on our ordinary world. In the title poem, “Shopping Cart Dreams,” the shopping carts, which once dreamed of useful and meaningful lives, now face a different sad dream where they end up discarded and filled with the “detritus of all they once carried.”
Many of Twaronite’s poems document the absurd, but are 0ften, as you get into the spirit of things, more like thought experiments. He invites us to consider what it might be like to actually share a brain with another
… And in that moment, I suddenly understood all the mysteries of life and death and the pull of a river that could make someone follow it wherever it leads. I felt an irresistible urge to join them. It was then that I realized that the gorge was slowly closing as the hidden world zipped shut beneath me, leaving nothing but a crack in the sidewalk.
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59 person in “One Brain Between Us.” With a Twilight Zone mentality, he imagines a day in the future when an artist will paint a “Future Portrait of Dark Matter” and hang it in a distant art gallery and what might happen to an observer compelled to look deeply into the black canvas. Or what if in “Spare a Heart?” you open your front door to a well-dressed stranger who asks “Mister, can you spare a heart? My doctor says I need a new one but there’s none to be found. Please help.” And you move from thinking it a joke to offering some money for the stranger to go away to whimsical negotiating. And then the stranger pulls out a leather case containing actual surgical tools for the task at hand. Or what happens if you buy a new pet at a pet shop and go walking your dog in “Food Chain.” But it's not really a dog, but a banana slug? People are more accepting when I tell them it’s a dog rather than a slug. They’re always coming up to me, asking what breed it is. “It’s a miniature banana poo,” I tell them. “It’s adorable,” they say.
Twaronite, who lives in Tucson, Arizona, wanders with us through a nearby saguaro forest of hundred year old giant saguaros in his poem “Willed to Science.” He first shows us cactus bodies …riddled with bullet holes or oozing black rot, shrouded in brittle gray skin over white spongy innards, crumbling away to reveal sollemn silvery ribbed columns… Then he considers the ultimate disposition of his body. Would that my body were not promised to some medical student I will never meet (alas) to probe and dissect the plaques and tangles of my brain or whatever gets me in the end, and that I could rest here instead among these departed friends, my withered innards slowly disintegrating to reveal my silvery rib cage waiting for the desert to take me back. And wouldn’t I make a fine lamp.
Poetry Journal Summer 2022
Twaronite’s poems subtly suggest a choice we are free to see a unique world within a sidewalk crack or, facing an unhappy dreamscape, to choose a better, different dream.
Tipton Poetry Journal Summer 2022 And,60 on the subject of saguaros, here is the entire text of “Arms at Ninety Five:” What if we grew like the saguaro and waited until fifty to grow an arm, or not even grow one, a lovely spear standing tall against the sky? Or we could wait until ninety-five, sprouting little baby stumps still learning to reach out and take hold of something worth holding.
Gene Twaronite is a clever but compassionate poet. And he tells us plainly, in “The Poet’s Job,” how to do it. Watch through the window to write of things in plain view like the lone black thong flapping defiantly in a sea of white briefs. … turn everything into something else. Make the words go incognito until their true identiities are revealed. … Mourn the spaces left whenbehindthere are no words.
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Gene Twaronite is the author of four collections of poetry as well as the rhyming picture book How to Eat Breakfast. His first poetry book Trash Picker on Mars, published by Kelsay Books, was the winner of the 2017 New Mexico Arizona Book Award for Arizona poetry. His newest poetry collection Shopping Cart Dreams was published by Kelsay Books in 2022. A former New Englander, Gene now lives in Tucson, Arizona. Follow more of his poetry at https://genetwaronitepoet.com/ or https://www.instagram.com/genetwaronitepoetry
Barry Harris is editor of the Tipton Poetry Journal and four anthologies by Brick Street Poetry. He has published one poetry collection, Something At The Center. Married and father of two grown sons, 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, North Dakota Quarterly, Boston Literary Magazine, Night Train, Silver Birch Press, Flying Island, Awaken Consciousness, Writers‘ Bloc, Red Headed Stepchild and Laureate: The Literary Journal of Arts for Lawrence. He graduated a long time ago with a major in English from Ball State University.
Tipton Poetry Journal Summer 2022
62 Editor Barry Harris is editor of the Tipton Poetry Journal and four anthologies by Brick Street Poetry: Mapping the Muse: A Bicentennial Look at Indiana Poetry; Words and Other Wild Things and Cowboys & Cocktails:Poems from the True Grit Saloon, and Reflections on Little Eagle Creek. He has published one poetry collection, Something At The Center.
Married and father of two grown sons, 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, North Dakota Quarterly, Boston Literary Magazine, Night Train, Silver Birch Press, Flying Island, Awaken Consciousness, Writers‘ Bloc, Red Headed Stepchild and Laureate: The Literary Journal of Arts for Lawrence. 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.
He graduated a long time ago with a major in English from Ball State University.
Alan Altany, Ph.D., lives in Florida and is a septuagenarian college professor of religious studies. He’s been a factory worker, swineherd on a farm, hotel clerk, lawn maintenance worker, small magazine of poetry editor, director of religious education for churches, truck driver, novelist, etc. He published a book of poetry in 2022 entitled A Beautiful Absurdity. His website is at https://www.alanaltany.com/.
Tipton Poetry Journal Summer 2022 63 Contributor Biographies
Mea Andrews is a writer from Georgia, who currently resides in China. She has just finished her MFA from Lindenwood University and is only recently back on the publication scene. You can find her in Vermilion, Rappahannock Review, and others. You can also follow her on Instagram at mea_writes or go to her website at meaandrews.com
Holly Day’s writing has recently appeared in Analog SF, The Hong Kong Review, and Appalachian Journal, and her recent book publications include Music Composition for Dummies, The Tooth is the Largest Organ in the Human Body, and Bound in Ice. She lives in Minneapolis and teaches creative writing at The Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis and Hugo House in Seattle.
Nettie Farris is the author of four chapbooks of poetry: The Alice Poems (dancing girl press, 2022), The Wendy Bird Poems (dancing girl press, 2022), Fat Crayons (Finishing Line Press, 2015) and Communion (Accents Publishing, 2013). Her reviews have appeared in Blue Lyra Review and North American Review. Her flash lyric essays have appeared in Miracle Monocle. She lives in Floyds Knobs, Indiana.
Rosemary Freedman is a poet, a painter and an advanced practice nurse. She has 7 children and lives in Carmel, Indiana with her husband Jack. Rosemary enjoys growing peonies and tending her large garden. She is a graduate of Indiana University.
George Freek is a poet/playwright living in Belvidere, Illionois. George Freek's poetry appears in numerous Journals and Reviews. His poem "Written At Blue Lake" was recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize. His collection Melancholia is published by Red Wolf Editions.
Matthew Brennan has published six books of poetry, most recently Snow in New York (Lamar U. Literary Press, 2021). He has recently published poems in Amsterdam Quarterly, THINK, Valparaiso Poetry Review, and Concho River Review. After teaching at Indiana State University for 32 years, he relocated to Columbus, Ohio. After 34 years with Eli Lilly and Company, Brendan Crowley set up his own consulting and executive coaching business, Brendan Crowley Advisors LLC. He helps executives grow in their roles and careers. Brendan is originally from Ireland and lives with his wife Rosaleen in Zionsville, Indiana. He has a passion for photography and loves taking photographs of his home country, Ireland, and here in Indiana.
Oleg Feoktistov is a teacher at a local high school in Odesa, Ukraine. Oleg teaches English language and literature. His class is a special place where thirty kids learn, play, and get ready for life.
Aaron Harris graduated from Grinnell College and works as a software engineer in Minneapolis. Elizabeth Hill’s poetry has been/is soon to be published in 34th Parallel Magazine, Blue Lake Review, Last Stanza Poetry Journal, and I 70 Review, among other journals. She is a retired Administrative Law Judge who decided suits between learning disabled children and their school systems. She lives in Harlem, New York City, with her husband and two irascible cats. Rebecca Hill lives in Bloomington, Indiana. She has been published twice in Flying Island Journal, and in the Midwest Poetry Review.
John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident now living in Rhode Island, recently published in Sheepshead Review, Stand, Poetry Salzburg Review and Hollins Critic. Latest books, Leaves On Page, Memory Outside The Head and Guest Of Myself are available through Amazon. Work upcoming in Ellipsis, Blueline and International Poetry Review.
64 Andrew Gent was born in England, grew up in Ohio, and now lives in New Hampshire where he works as an information architect. His first book, [explicit lyrics], won the Miller Williams Poetry prize and is available from the University of Arkansas Press.
Vicki Iorio is the author of the poetry collections Poems from the Dirty Couch (Local Gems Press), Not Sorry (Alien Buddha Press) and the chapbooks Send Me a Letter (dancinggirlpress) and Something Fishy (Finishing Line Press). Her poetry has appeared in numerous print and on line journals including The Painted Bride Quarterly, Rattle, poets respond on line, The Fem Lit Magazine, and The American Journal of Poetry. Vicki is currently living in Florida but her heart is in New York.
William Greenway’s 13th collection, As Long As We’re Here, is from FutureCycle Press. He has won the Helen and Laura Krout Memorial Poetry Award, the Larry Levis Editors’ Prize from Missouri Review, the Open Voice Poetry Award from The Writer's Voice, the State Street Press Chapbook Competition, an Ohio Arts Council Grant, an Academy of American Poets Prize, and was Georgia Author of the Year. Publications include Poetry, American Poetry Review, Southern Review, Missouri Review, Georgia Review, Southern Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, Poetry Northwest, and Shenandoah. Greenway is Distinguished Professor of English Emeritus at Youngstown State University, and now lives in Ephrata, Pennsylvania. Carol Lynn Stevenson Grellas lives in the Sierra Foothills of California. She studied at Santa Clara University, where she was an English major. She is an eight time Pushcart nominee, a five time Best of the Net nominee and the author of the following collections of poetry: Epistemology of an Odd Girl, Hasty Notes in No Particular Order, Letters Under the Banyan Tree, The Wanderer’s Dominion, Breakfast in Winter, and the winning chapbook in The Red Ochre Chapbook Contest, Before I Go to Sleep. Her work has appeared in: The Yale Journal for Humanities in Medicine, Poets and Artists, War, Literature and the Arts. She is the Assistant Editor for The Orchards Poetry Journal and a member of the Sacramento group of poets called Writers on Air. According to family lore, she is a direct descendant of Robert Louis Stevenson. www.clgrellaspoetry.com
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65 Karen Luke Jackson, author of The View Ever Changing, 2021, and GRIT, 2020, draws inspiration from contemplative practices, nature, family stories, and clowning. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals, including Ruminate, Broad River Review (Ron Rash Poetry Award), Atlanta Review, One, Redheaded Stepchild, and Kestrel. Karen resides in a cottage on a goat pasture in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North www.karenlukejackson.comCarolina.
Jack e Lorts, a retired educator, lives in rural eastern Oregon, where he continues to publish widely, if only occassionally, online and such places as Windfall, Phantom Drift, Chiron Review, Tipton Poetry Journal, Verse Virtual & Verse Daily. His most recent book is The Love Songs of Ephram Pratt, many of which appear widely online.
Richard Luftig is a former professor of educational psychology and special education at Miami University in Ohio now residing in California. He is a recipient of the Cincinnati Post Corbett Foundation Award for Literature. His poems have appeared in numerous literary journals in the United States and internationally in Canada, Australia, Europe, and Asia. His latest book of poems, A Grammar for Snow, has been published by Unsolicited Press.
Jill Michelle's latest poems appear/are forthcoming in DMQ Review, Eclectica Magazine, Gyroscope Review, Bacopa Literary Review and Drunk Monkeys. Recent anthology credits include The Book of Bad Betties (Bad Betty Press, UK) and Words from the Brink (Arachne Press Limited, UK). She teaches at Valencia College in Orlando, Florida. Find more of her work at byjillmichelle.com
Tipton Poetry Journal Summer 2022
Stephanie Keep is a writer living in Montana. Her poetry practice has come as a welcome surprise borne of long walks, first along the streets of San Francisco and now on the trails of her native Mountain West. In every creative venture, she's looking for interesting, not perfect.
Bruce Levine has spent his life as a writer of fiction and poetry and as a music and theatre professional. A 2019 Pushcart Prize Poetry nominee, a 2021 Spillwords Press Awards winner, the Featured Writer in WestWard Quarterly Summer 2021 and his bio is featured in “Who’s Who of Emerging Writers 2020.” Bruce has over three hundred works published on over twenty five on line journals including Ariel Chart, Spillwords, The Drabble; in over seventy print books including Poetry Quarterly, Haiku Journal, Tipton Poetry Journal; Halcyon Days Founder’s Favourites (on line and print) and his shows have been produced in New York and around the country. His work is dedicated to the loving memory of his late wife, Lydia Franklin. A native Manhattanite, Bruce now lives and writes in Maine. Visit him at www.brucelevine.com
Michael Keshigian had his fourteenth poetry collection, What To Do With Intangibles, recently released in January, 2020 by Cyberwit.net. He has been published in numerous national and international journals and has appeared as feature writer in twenty publications with 7 Pushcart Prize and 2 Best Of The Net nominations. He lives in New Hampshire. (michaelkeshigian.com)
Charlene Langfur lives in Palm Springs, California, and is a southern Californian, an organic gardener, a Syracuse University Graduate Writing Fellow. Her most recent publications include poems in Emrys, Inlandia, North Dakota Quarterly, and a series of poems forthcoming in Weber The Contemporary West.
James Mulhern’s writing has appeared in literary journals over two hundred times and has been recognized with many awards. In 2015, Mr. Mulhern was granted a writing fellowship to Oxford University. That same year, a story was longlisted for the Fish Short Story Prize. In 2017, he was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Two of his novels were Finalists for the United Kingdom’s Wishing Shelf Book Awards. His novel, Give Them Unquiet Dreams, is a Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year. He was shortlisted for the Aesthetica Creative Writing Award 2021 for his poetry. Mulhern now lives in Florida. Benjamin Nash lives in Austin, Texas. His poems have been published in Louisiana Literature, 2River, Pembroke Magazine, Concho River Review, and other publications.
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66 Stewart Mintzer lives in the Los Angeles area and his poems have appeared in several online and print journals. He is presently working on ‘The Permission Slip Project,”
exploring ways to encourage and invite, image, sound, and ‘medicine’ in this sweet bruising Mystery of a Life.
A Best of the Net and seven time Pushcart Prize nominee, Julie L. Moore is the author of four poetry collections, including, most recently, Full Worm Moon, which won a 2018 Woodrow Hall Top Shelf Award and received honorable mention for the Conference on Christianity and Literature's 2018 Book of the Year Award. A previous contributor to Tipton Poetry Journal, Moore has also published poetry in African American Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Image, New Ohio Review, Poetry Daily, Prairie Schooner, The Southern Review, and Verse Daily. She is the Writing Center Director at Taylor University in Upland, Indiana, where she is also the poetry editor for Relief Journal. Learn more about her work at julielmoore.com.
Poetry Journal Summer
George Moore’s recent collections include Children’s Drawings of the Universe (Salmon Poetry 2015) and Saint Agnes Outside the Walls (FutureCycle 2016). His work has been published in The Atlantic, Poetry, North American Review, Orion, and The Colorado Review. After a career in literature and writing with the University of Colorado, Boulder, he lives on the south shore of Nova Scotia.
Cecil Morris, retired after 37 years of teaching high school English, now tries writing himself what he spent so many years teaching others to understand and (maybe) enjoy. He likes ice cream too much and cruciferous vegetables too little for his own good. He has had a handful of poems published in 2River View, Cobalt Review, English Journal, The Ekphrastic Review, Evening Street Review, The Midwest Quarterly, Poem, and other literary magazines. He lives in Roseville, California.
Gloria Parker is a retired primary school teacher living in Pennsylvania. Her poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Margie, Slipstream, Paterson Literary Review, Gyroscope, Rattle, North Dakota Quarterly, Nimrod, Black Coffee Review, Loch Raven Review and elsewhere.
Sharon Lopez Mooney, began writing in ’76, a few years later, she was given a CAC Grant for rural poetry series. Soon after, she co published a local anthology; co owned an alternative literature service; produced poetry readings. She has retired from Interfaith Chaplaincy in the ‘death & dying’ field, now lives in Sonora, Mexico, visits Northern California family. Mooney’s poems are in many publications such as: Glassworks, Avalon Literary Review, Galway Review, Ginosko Literary Journal, California Quarterly, Chicago Memory House, Ricochet Review, Roundtable Literary Journal, and various anthologies: CALYX; Cold Lake; Smoke & Myrrors (UK), nationally & internationally. More poems at: www.sharonlopezmooney.com
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Poetry Journal Summer 2022
Lizzy Ke Polishan lives in Pennsylvania and holds a BA in English and philosophy from The University of Scranton. Her work has appeared in Esprit, The Rectangle, and Mangrove. In 2017 she won the Eleanor B North Poetry Award and in 2020 she published her first collection of poetry, A Little Book of Blooms. In theory she is working on her second poetry collection, though in reality she is likely sewing an obsessive amount of dresses in trippy medieval fabrics.
Timothy Robbins has been teaching English as a Second Language for 30 years. His poems have appeared in many literary journals and has published five volumes of poetry: Three New Poets (Hanging Loose Press), Denny’s Arbor Vitae (Adelaide Books), Carrying Bodies (Main Street Rag Press) Mother Wheel (Cholla Needles Press) and This Night I Sup in Your House (Cyberwit.net). He lives in Wisconsin with his husband of 25 years.
Patrick T. Reardon, a three time Pushcart Prize nominee living in Chicago, is the author of ten books, including the poetry collection Darkness on the Face of the Deep (Kelsay Books). Forthcoming in 2022 are his memoir in prose poems Puddin’: The Autobiography of a Baby (Third World) and his chapbook The Lost Tribes (Gray Book).
67 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 latest chapbook, What's Given, is available from Kattywompus Press.
Claire Scott is an award winning poet in Oakland, California who has received multiple Pushcart Prize nominations. Her work has been accepted by the Atlanta Review, Bellevue Literary Review, New Ohio Review, Enizagam and Healing Muse among others. Claire is the author of Waiting to be Called and Until I Couldn’t. She is the co author of Unfolding in Light: A Sisters’ Journey in Photography and Poetry Nolo Segundo, pen name of L. J. Carber, became a published poet in his 70's in 99 literary journals in the U.S., U.K., Canada, Romania, India, and in 2 trade book collections: The Enormity of Existence [2020] and Of Ether and Earth [2021]. Both titles reflect the awareness he's had for over 50 years since having an NDE whilst almost drowning in a Vermont river: that he has is a consciousness that predates birth and survives death, what poets once called a soul. Nominated for the Pushcart Prize 2022, he's a retired teacher [America, Japan, Taiwan, Cambodia] now living in New Jersey who's been married 42 years to a smart and beautiful Taiwanese woman. Mary Sexson lives in Indianapolis and is author of the award winning book, 103 in the Light, Selected Poems 1996 2000 (Restoration Press), and co author of Company of Women, New and Selected Poems (Chatter House Press). Her poetry has appeared in Tipton Poetry Journal, Laureate, Hoosier Lit, Flying Island, New Verse News, Grasslands Review, and Last Stanza Poetry Journal, among others. She has recent work in Reflections on Little Eagle Creek, Anti Heroin Chic, and Last Stanza Poetry Journal Issue #8. Finishing Line Press will publish her manuscript, Her Addiction, An Empty Place at the Table, in 2023. Sexson’s poetry is part of the INverse Poetry Archives for Hoosier Poets.
Christopher Stolle’s writing has appeared most recently in Tipton Poetry Journal, Flying Island, Last Stanza Poetry Journal, The New Southern Fugitives, The Alembic, Gravel, The Light Ekphrastic, Sheepshead Review, and Plath Poetry Project. He’s an editor for DK Publishing and he lives in Richmond, Indiana.
Anne Whitehouse’s recent poetry collection is Outside from the Inside (Dos Madres Press, 2020), and her recent chapbook is Escaping Lee Miller (Ethel Zine and Micro Press, 2021).. Anne is also the author of a novel, Fall Love, and she has been publishing a series of essays about Edgar Allan Poe. She lives in New York City and Columbia County, New York. www.annewhitehouse.com
Canadian68 poet, fiction writer, and playwright J. J. Steinfeld lives on Prince Edward Island, where he is patiently waiting for Godot’s arrival and a phone call from Kafka. While waiting, he has published 23 books, including Identity Dreams and Memory Sounds (Poetry, Ekstasis Editions, 2014), Madhouses in Heaven, Castles in Hell (Stories, Ekstasis Editions, 2015), An Unauthorized Biography of Being (Stories, Ekstasis Editions, 2016), Absurdity, Woe Is Me, Glory Be (Poetry, Guernica Editions, 2017), A Visit to the Kafka Café (Poetry, Ekstasis Editions, 2018), and Gregor Samsa Was Never in The Beatles (Stories, Ekstasis Editions, 2019), Morning Bafflement and Timeless Puzzlement (Poetry, Ekstasis Editions, 2020), Somewhat Absurd, Somehow Existential (Poetry, Guernica Editions, 2021), and Acting on the Island (Stories, Pottersfield Press, 2022).His short stories and poems have appeared in numerous periodicals and anthologies internationally, and over 50 of his one act plays and a handful of full length plays have been performed in Canada and the United States
David Vancil is retired from the faculty of Indiana State University. His work has appeared in small periodicals, critical reviews, and a few anthologies. As well, he is the author of four poetry collections. War and Its Discontents, a collection of military poems centered on family service and his own time in the U.S. Army, will be published by Angelina River Press sometime in 2022. He is at work on a collection of new and selected poems, which he hopes to publish no later than 2023. David lives in Terre Haute, Indiana, with his wife, three cats, and a dog.
Tipton Poetry Journal Summer 2022
Jessica D. Thompson’s poems have appeared in numerous journals including The Southern Review, Ruminate, and The Midwest Quarterly, as well as in many anthologies such as the Women of Appalachia Project's Women Speak, Vol. 7, (Sheila Na Gig). Her first full length poetry collection, Daybreak and Deep, will be available from Kelsay Books in the Fall of 2022. Jessica lives in Evansville, Indiana.
