tpj66

Tipton Poetry Journal

Tipton Poetry Journal

Tipton Poetry Journal

Tipton Poetry Journal Editor’s Note

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

Statistics: This issue features 36 poets from the United States (20 unique states), and 2 poets from Canada and Ukraine.

Our Featured Poem this issue is “Nomad's Daughter” written by Leslie Schultz. Schultz's poem, which also receives an award of $25, can be found on page 1. The featured poem was chosen by the Board of Directors of Brick Street Poetry, Inc., the Indiana nonprofit organization who publishes Tipton Poetry Journal.

Cover Photo Route 66 by Barry Harris. To celebrate our 66th issue, this issue's cover was found at a restaurant at LAX airport in Los Angeles.

Barry Harris, Editor

Copyright 2025 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

Contents

Leslie Schultz .............................................................. 1 Timothy Pilgrim ........................................................ 2 Wally Swist ............................................................... 2 Jim Tilley ................................................................... 4 Patrick T. Reardon .................................................... 5 Charlie Brice .............................................................. 6 Tia Paul-Louis ........................................................... 7 Ruth Holzer ............................................................... 8 Mark B. Hamilton...................................................... 9 Erica Anderson-Senter ............................................ 10 Roger D. Anderson ................................................... 12 Janet Reed ................................................................ 13 Mykyta Ryzhykh ...................................................... 14 Philip C. Kolin........................................................... 16 Dave Seter ................................................................ 17 Carolyn Kreiter-Foronda .........................................18 Joyce Brinkman .......................................................18 J.J. Steinfeld ............................................................ 20 Allison Thorpe ......................................................... 22 Elise Paschen ........................................................... 22 Mary Redman .......................................................... 24 Neil Carpathios........................................................ 28 Elaine Fowler Palencia ............................................ 29 George Freek ........................................................... 30 John Grey ................................................................ 32

Tipton Poetry Journal

Mark Vogel .............................................................. 34 Lori Zavada ............................................................. 36 Lynette Lamp .......................................................... 38 Jenny Kalahar ......................................................... 40 Arvilla Fee ............................................................... 42 Heather Sager ......................................................... 43 Mark MacAllister .................................................... 44 Chase Harker........................................................... 46 Patrick Theron Erickson ......................................... 48 Robin Gobetz ........................................................... 50 Tanya Gick .............................................................. 52 Nolo Segundo .......................................................... 52

Tipton Poetry Journal

Tipton Poetry Journal

Nomad's Daughter Leslie Schultz I dream I see my father, once the deluge is old news, wandering in the street.

He has on his black, zipped-up half boots and white socks.

Farther up, blinding me, an immaculate hospital gown, white as the heart of a star.

He wears the stunned look of the recently dead. A rime of salt circles his open lips, but he doesn’t mind when I take him by the hand, help him to lie down right here, in the very center of this poem.

[This poem was first published in Third Wednesday Magazine]

Leslie Schultz (Northfield, Minnesota) has five collections of poetry; of these, Geranium Lake: Poems on Art and ArtMaking (Kelsay Books) is her most recent. Her poetry has appeared widely, in such journals as Poet Lore, Midwest Quarterly, Naugatuck River Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Tipton Poetry Journal, and Blue Unicorn. She serves as a judge for the Maria W. Faust Sonnet Contest. In addition to poems, she publishes photographs, essays, and fiction; makes quilts and soups; and happily mucks about in a garden plagued by shade, rabbits, and walnut trees.

1

Tipton Poetry Journal

Out of vogue Timothy Pilgrim A tiny bit of ruth remains inside me just below the spleen. Empathy, guilt remorse — wee feelings of caring caught in crouch, cower, cringe. Safe for now from stony scoff, scorn, taunt callous hate. Meanwhile all around anchored in anger, swagger, hate being ruthless remains the rage.

Timothy Pilgrim, a Montana native, age 78, living in Bellingham, Washington, has several hundred acceptances from U.S. journals such as Seattle Review, Sierra Nevada Review, Tipton Poetry Journal and Santa Ana River Review, and international journals such as Windsor Review in Canada and Prole Press in the U.K.-- and two books of poetry. See timothypilgrim.org.

The Light Itself Wally Swist Enrapt, eyes wide, you tell me that you are in a temple, standing next to the plinth of a column, that a moonbeam is shining on the marble, that you clearly see the pillar in the light. You go deeper.

Now you not only see

2

Tipton Poetry Journal

the beam of light but you are the light itself, moving over marble and column, possibly across the Peloponnesian landscape, roving among olive groves and cityscape alike.

You pause and I imagine that you might be bodiless as you continue to alert me to where you are and what you see next, but you just may not be disembodied at all, you might be the moonbeam itself casting its spotlight, marking the darkness of night with a brilliance, illuminating what may have been asleep that is now awake momentarily, infusing your light on one path then another, while going wherever it is you want to go, not in a past life, but in this one.

Wally Swist’s books include Huang Po and the Dimensions of Love (Southern Illinois University Press, 2012), selected by Yusef Komunyakaa for the 2011 Crab Orchard Open Poetry Competition, and A Bird Who Seems to Know Me: Poems Regarding Birds and Nature, winner of the 2018 Ex Ophidia Poetry Prize. Recent essays, poems, and translations have appeared in Chicago Quarterly Review, Commonweal, The Comstock Review, Frontier Poetry, Healing Muse, Illuminations, La Piccioletta Barca (U.K.), Pensive, Sunspot Lit, and Your Impossible Voice. Forthcoming titles include If You’re the Dreamer, I’m the Dream: Selected Translations from Rilke’s Book of Hours from Finishing Line Press and Kelsay Books will publish Aperture, poems regarding caregiving his wife through Alzheimer’s.

3

Tipton Poetry Journal

Mount Washington Jim Tilley Above the tree line, sparse, low-lying, or no vegetation, and millions, even billions, of granite boulders poured down the slopes, broken from a massive sheet of rock when a glacier scraped the land during the Ice Age. Never mind that it has the worst weather in the world, yet changeable in an instant, the record wind speed there 231 miles per hour.

Never mind that trying to scale the heights has already killed more than 170 people and will most likely kill many more.

Atop the weather station’s observatory, I finally understood the Venturi effect, or at least got smacked in the face by it, holding onto my woolen hat pulled down over my ears, forcing a smile for the camera before being blown away by the 360º panorama of the spectacular White Mountains until a low-lying cloud enveloped me and I could barely see in front of myself. It is by far the highest mountain in the Presidential Range, and thus worthy of his attention.

Throughout his endless bluster, I hold my breath while waiting for him to claim and rename the place, for what else could he possibly do when looking down on all those past presidents—Madison and Jefferson from the north; Adams, Monroe, Eisenhower, and Pierce to the south; and, of course, all the others not fortunate enough to be included in this historic line-up? Imagine those restrooms at the summit refinished in black and white marble and gold.

Jim Tilley lives in New York State and has published four fulllength collections of poetry and a novel with Red Hen Press. His short memoir, The Elegant Solution, was published as a Ploughshares Solo. Five of his poems have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. His most recent poetry collection, Ripples in the Fabric of the Universe: New & Selected Poems, was published in June 2024. His forthcoming collection, When Godot Arrived, will be published in 2026.

4

Tipton Poetry Journal

Middle Testament Patrick T. Reardon One-Cent archived the Middle Testament. He slipstreamed the sequences and Exsultet. He spiritualed Great Lent. He measured on Good Friday the empty tabernacle, doorless. His feet he left unwashed. He broke invisible ikons. The terra cotta army draft, he dodged. He stain-glassed himself to the left of the pulpit with a green halo. He danced before the altar like the lusty king, sinner and poet. He traveled in search of the Grail and the Whale and the rapid-eyed bird. He found bitter herbs and a lost supper and the unpassed cup.

They broke the legs of the thieves as he watched.

Patrick T. Reardon, who was a Chicago Tribune reporter for 32 years and is the author of seven poetry collections. His latest is Every Marred Thing: A Time in America, the winner of the 2024 Faulkner-Wisdom Prize from the Pirate’s Alley Faulkner Society of New Orleans (Lavender Ink). He is a five-time nominee in poetry for a Pushcart Prize. His poetry has appeared in America, RHINO, Commonweal, After Hours, Autumn Sky, Burningword Literary Journal and other journals.

Photo credit: Steve Kagan

5

Tipton Poetry Journal

Ma Rainey and Beethoven Charlie Brice Ma Rainey and Beethoven once unwrapped their bed roll. ~Bob Dylan

The blow that blew her there was powerful. It was dark, she couldn’t see anything. She would have screamed in fear had it not been that she felt sublime.

Overcome with fatigue, she unwrapped her bedroll, lay down for a nap. That’s when she felt him slip in beside her. He filled out the darkness around her.

She felt his warm breath encompass her lips—heard his song, a familiar melody, one she somehow had always known. Her breath intoned with his, she sang her song. Their harmony eclipsed the cosmos, aligned the spheres. She unwrapped herself like a bud burst into bloom. Entwined until they shuddered, he was the rider she couldn’t see. She, his gold-neck girl, taught him to vibrate—taught him so well he didn’t need ears.

She gave him the blues. He left her an ode to joy.

Charlie Brice won the 2020 Field Guide Poetry Magazine Poetry Contest and placed third in the 2021 Allen Ginsberg Poetry Prize. His ninth full-length poetry collection is Tragedy in the Arugula Aisle (Arroyo Seco Press, 2025). His poetry has been nominated for the Best of Net Anthology and the Pushcart Prize and has appeared in Atlanta Review, The Honest Ulsterman, Ibbetson Street, Chiron Review, The MacGuffin, and elsewhere. He lives in Pittsburgh.

6

Tipton Poetry Journal

Before Dawn Tia Paul-Louis The bed's larger.

I still can't sleep.

Am I missing hours or someone?

They're all gone.

It's silent, void and close enough now to hear God. Turns out He not only echoes in space.

Turns out, He conducts the waves when they crescendo on and offshore.

And that time is coming to stare at the sun and not go blind; when this terminal flesh has no more weight and selfless as can be I will enter the Gate. For now, I'm under covers where I toss in chills and sometimes an aching warmth followed by chills.

No anxiety here, though. Left a year ago.

If I'm anxious, it's for home.

Must I live here first?

Tia Paul-Louis is a fiction writer and poet from Florida. She began experimenting with songwriting at age 11 and later felt a deeper connection to poetry. Her themes portray family life, gender role controversies, mental health, and spiritual values.

She admires the freedom of expression in most forms of art such as music, acting, and painting.

7

Tipton Poetry Journal

The Day Job Ruth Holzer First thing in the morning I write a report on what I did the day before, which was write a report on the war, whichever war, then I write a report on having written that report then another report based on that one, making sure to include the main bullet points of the previous reports and, to conclude, I fabricate a gold standard, megawatt, meta-report summarizing the whole sorry catalog of reports and send it up the food chain.

Ruth Holzer is the author of nine chapbooks, most recently, Float (Kelsay Books), Home and Away (dancing girl press) and Living in Laconia (Gyroscope Press). Her poems have appeared in Blue Unicorn, California Quarterly, Freshwater, POEM, Slant and previously in Tipton Poetry Journal. A multiple Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee, among her awards are the Edgar Allan Poe Memorial Prize, the Tanka Splendor Award and the Ito En Art of Haiku Contest Grand Prize. She lives in Virginia.

8

Tipton Poetry Journal

At Boggs Run Mark B. Hamilton In fast water red towboats shuttle empty barges bank to bank like ants with big black seeds.

Shouldered toward the terminal, I row harder into shoal waters hugging the opposite bank like a mouse navigating along the baseboard of a dance floor. Beneath sweeping arcs of coal powered wires the red jacketed waiters nod condescendingly, and a General raises an eyebrow rattling his sabre above the waltzing shuffle of big black shoes.

I cross the busy ballroom of a blue-collar river, the symphony’s pit filling with drum and cymbal crashing against the long piers of Consolidated Coal.

Then drift away, staying well past, down to the radical oxbow at the Indian mounds, and the tall, single smokestack of Edison Electric coloring-in the sky with its big gray crayon.

[This poem was first published in Oyo: The Beautiful River]

Mark B. Hamilton (MFA, University of Montana) writes eco-poetry, often focused on theriparian zone of the Ohio and Missouri Rivers, where he has traveled extensively by kayak and rowing dory. His interests include: First Nations cosmologies, pre-industrial America, and the poetics of climate change. His poetry volumes include: Lake, River, Mountain (Cornerstone Press, 2024), the chapbook Upstream (Finishing Line Press, 2024), and Oyo: The Beautiful River (Shanti Arts Publishing, 2020). A forthcoming book of traditional verse, 1803: The Wintering, based upon Captain William Clark’s journal entries while at Camp Dubois on the Mississippi, will be published in January 2026. He lives in Richmond, Indiana.

9

Tipton Poetry Journal

Something Abstract Shifts Like Light Erica Anderson-Senter Drop a mirror into a deep lake.

First, put your finger under your eye and push into the soft skin. Look in the mirror. Press in farther until your eye begins to water. Release when your face blurs, release when you become familiar with yourself again—you are & are not the sheets of flesh you see.

Wet your palms with the fattest part of your tongue. Taste the dirt you’ll be buried in— I want to tell you important facts about after you are dead but I can’t. You live forever & die every day. Who’s to say what is true?

Bring your nose to the tight tension of surface water: inhale & inhale again. Go back to your mother’s lilac womb, your muscles unspool and tie down your floating bones. She is still haunted by your haze: blood & fingernails, creation every day & destruction as often. You are small & weak, this much is true. You are meat & fat.

10

Tipton Poetry Journal

You are twin & shine— the dullest tooth in your head is a beating heart outside your window: drop a mirror into a dark lake—let it take light with it, down past your rippling skin.

Erica Anderson-Senter writes from Fort Wayne, Indiana. Her first collection of poetry, Midwestern Poet's Incomplete Guide to Symbolism, was published

by EastOver Press in 2021. Her work has appeared in boats against the current, BRAWL lit, SWING, and others. She was the commissioned artist for Acres Land Trust in 2023 writing poetry inspired by Wing Haven Nature Preserve. Erica curates and hosts poetry events around Northeast Indiana and has been in artistic conversation with visual artists in a few exhibitions.

Erica teaches Creative Writing at Purdue Fort Wayne and offers writing workshops, courses, and tutoring with her partner. She has her MFA from the Writing Seminars at Bennington College in Bennington, Vermont.

11

Tipton Poetry Journal

Judy Roger D. Anderson I had sought to paint a portrait of this beautiful woman sitting quietly in front of me and when finished, I stood back to admire her vision on the canvas which had so pleased me but the colors had not yet dried and soon she became different as the pastels flowed together changing her into something yet more lovely than I had first created a portrait created by man cannot capture the beauty of this woman only when her colors act of their own and flow together does she become herself and only for that one moment [This poem was first published in Cholla Needles 106] Roger D. Anderson lives with his wife and soulmate, Judy, in Omaha, Nebraska. Each day is a new adventure in their journey together to somewhere. Credits include Fine Lines, Westward Quarterly, Nebraska Life, Cholla Needles, Chronogram, Scarlet Leaf Review, The Stray Branch, and Time of Singing.

12

Tipton Poetry Journal

Altar Janet Reed I am every age I’ve ever been.

I have known the world only to lose it in a landslide, the clung truths of what I thought I knew scattered in rough stones across a highway, the hard job of cleaning up followed by the harder work of rebuilding myself, each time a new mosaic of rockface no longer chiseled sleek and silver like the jaw of Jefferson on Rushmore.

Each new me is an altar of change crafted with the mortar of cast-off beliefs, the dust of regret for unplayed melodies, and sand of gratitude for another chance to be better than I was, another chance to love the cracks between the stones of storm as much as the sweet scent of honeysuckle pushing its way through the scars.

Janet Reed is the author of Blue Exhaust (FLP, 2019). She is also a multi-year Pushcart Prize and Best of the Web nominee. Her work has appeared in Sow’s Ear Review, Emry’s, Common Ground, Tipton Poetry Journal, and others. She taught creative writing, literature, and composition and worked as a family success coach in Boone County, Missouri. She thinks a lot about how to make metaphors tell stories while walking her dogs.

13

Tipton Poetry Journal

leviathan Mykyta Ryzhykh Dictators ride to and fro upon tigers which they dare not dismount.

And the tigers are getting hungry. ~ Winston Churchill

(Invocatio) god of iron rivers, bring to us like floodwood your tangles of suffering and grief bring to us your constitution and your plenary sessions of deputies bring to us in torrents your new agendas to wash over us like mad cataracts and like clouds of silt your mornings of emptiness, regret, futility, rage.

(Supplicatio) my friend my brother my son my father my reflection my monster I love you at sunset and at dawn.

At noon will I speak and declare I love you, reverently, with every breath, with every prayer.

I vote for you in elections and without any choice I die for you alone and in company at home and far away.

And still I don’t know who you are.

Exarchs of your iron altar oversee each blood sacrifice but don’t resurrect anyone, don’t redeem anyone, don’t spare any of us the tithe of anguish, and thus do I endlessly die honored under your holy banner.

Where is our salvation? Where is our deliverance from the many blessings of your stateoperators and your

14

statechannels?

Tipton Poetry Journal

(Valedictio) If someone wrote prose about this, blood would drip like poetry.

As snowflake isotopes your divine offices will fall upon the city; your sacraments will descend upon us like gasoline waterfalls.

Until the seventeenth day of some distant seventh month, mountains of scrap metal will grow around us like rusting Ararats.

Your emissary will affix his seal of bitterness on hope and laughter.

Your iron commisioners will indoctrinate us in your own image.

Your iron marshals will conscript us all (the knot of forced humility is already hung around our necks).

The god of iron rivers is coming, the god of iron skies and his iron legions.

The iron god brings to us his covenant, a rainbow of fire.

Already our cups are running over.

[This poem was first published by OPEN: Journal of Arts & Letters]

Mykyta Ryzhykh lives in Ukraine, has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and has been published any times in the journals Dzvin, Dnipro, Bukovinian magazine, Polutona, Rechport, Topos, Articulation, Formaslov, Literature Factory, Literary Chernihiv, Tipton Poetry Journal, Stone Poetry Journal, Divot journal, dyst journal, Superpresent Magazine, Allegro Poetry Magazine, Alternate Route, Better Than Starbucks Poetry & Fiction Journal, Littoral Press, Book of Matches, on the portals Litсenter, Ice Floe Press and Soloneba, in the Ukrainian literary newspaper.

15

Tipton Poetry Journal

Autumn Fields Philip C. Kolin The fields look different now grown white over this autumn night. And the trees have changed from hosting juicy sugar plums to displaying gold and red badges of courage for the longevity of their beauty.

Sparrow gleaners start the day in hopes of finishing it full with the leftovers their human counterparts have missed with their sickles and scythes.

By noontide the fields show spots of green but not nearly enough to match the paintings of them made just a month ago.

And at moonrise they have sprouted feathery frost again.

Philip C. Kolin is the Distinguished Professor of English Emeritus and Editor Emeritus of the Southern Quarterly at the University of Southern Mississippi. He has published 15 collections of poems including most recently Reaching Forever (Poiema Series, Cascade Books, 2019), Delta Tears: Poems (Main Street Rag, 2021), Wholly God's (Wind & Water Press, 2021), and Black Trauma: Resistance Poems about Black History (Third World Press, 2023). The 12th edition of his business writing textbook, Successful Writing at Work, was published last year by Cengage Learning.

16

Tipton Poetry Journal

When the Muse Hollers Dave Seter When the muse hollers, I don’t listen, because—tinnitus— rat-a-tat-tat on my eardrums.

Because I was always yelled at as a child.

When the muse hollers, I holler back. Nothing I like better than a good argument, than to fill my lungs with air and words.

Rollercoasters always make me want to scream When the muse hollers, I look both ways before crossing the street, left and right, then, up and down, too, in case the sky is falling.

Look—maybe the muse is a falling angel.

When the muse hollers, I consider whether they have had a hard life.

Orphaned maybe.

Maybe struck by lightning.

It’s o.k., I say to the muse.

It will all be o.k.

Dave Seter is an environmental engineer, poet, essayist, and translator. He is the author of the full length poetry collection Don’t Sing to Me of Electric Fences (Cherry Grove, 2021). His new chapbook is Somewhere West of the Mississippi (Mammoth Publications, 2025). He is currently serving as Sonoma County (California) Poet Laureate 2024-2026. More at: https://daveseter.com

17

Tipton Poetry Journal

Red-cockaded Woodpecker Carolyn Kreiter-Foronda Joyce Brinkman Come with me to a longleaf pine forest to witness the dapper pecks of a territorial woodpecker chiseling a nest hole, the beat thumping like the tap, tap, tap of a drum.

Come to a habitat scarred by the loss of mature pines, the loss of a keystone setting for a species that deserves the right to live, the right to be protected from a large-scale clearing of trees it relies on to build nest cavities to raise its young in a safe space.

Come. Witness an entire family foraging for insects. Watch these endangered creatures carve homes for roosting and nesting.

Witness their unwavering ability to outwit tree-climbing snakes. Witness their backs layered with black and white stripes shaped like a ladder, each male adorned with a tiny red strip bordering the top of a white cheek patch.

18

Tipton Poetry Journal Do your job. Plant longleaf pines.

Save this treasured bird.

Help this keystone species survive.

Woodpecker, drum that deserves safe space.

Endangered witness with white cheek patch.

Help species survive!

Dr. Carolyn Kreiter-Foronda served as Poet Laureate of Virginia from 2006-2008. She has co-edited three anthologies, co-authored a poem-play, and published nine books of poetry, including The Embrace: Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, winner of the international Art in Literature: The Mary Lynn Kotz Award. She has also received the Ellen Anderson Award, a Virginia Cultural Laureate Award, multiple first place awards from the Chesapeake Bay Branch of the National League of American Pen Women, an Edgar Allan Poe Poetry Award, among others.

Joyce Brinkman, Indiana Poet Laureate 2002-2008, believes in poetry as public art.

Color and light have inspired permanent public installations through collaborations with glass artists and painters, while the colors black and white figure prominently in her paintings. Her latest printed works include Seasons of Sharing: A Kasen Renku Collaboration with the poets of this chapbook and Elizabeth Barrett Browning Illuminated by the Message in the Literary Portals to Prayer Series. Joyce has received fellowships from the Mary Anderson Center for the Arts, the Vermont Studio, and the Indianapolis Arts Council.

19

Tipton Poetry Journal

You Never Went to Woodstock J.J. Steinfeld August 15, 2019, clock-radio intrusion, radio announcer, disembodied and upbeat, awoke you with a mundane revelation of the momentous, nostalgia-soaked fiftieth anniversary of Woodstock, honey-voiced editorializing: I wasn't even born then but my mother was there dancing naked, singing songs to posterity.

You spent the whole morning and half the afternoon trying to outwalk your uneasiness walking along the nearby boardwalk looking at the river of your youth, thinking of other rivers, other times, bodies of water always convey you elsewhere.

Your uneasiness still there, restless, slightly drunk, unshaven you spent the night reading and listening to music (pre- and post-Woodstock).

You read from John Milton's Paradise Lost finding yourself repeating the oft-repeated line about better to rule in Hell than serve in Heaven; you read from Bob Dylan’s Tarantula, from a biography of Phil Ochs— your reading that night was from book to book like a child hopscotching across a sidewalk— you read a poem by Sylvia Plath about her father that made you shiver saying aloud that you loved your father then you listened to an early Leonard Cohen album read all the poems in his Flowers for Hitler ate pretzels and pistachios, drank a little more wine

20

Tipton Poetry Journal

all and all, an up-and-down night, able to sleep only after listening to Joni Mitchell sing about Woodstock.

You almost went to Woodstock, but, having an aversion to crowds backed out at the last moment becoming neither stardust nor golden then or now.

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 25 books, including 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), 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), Acting on the Island (Stories, Pottersfield Press, 2022), As You Continue to Wait (Poetry, Ekstasis Editions, 2022), and My Post-Holocaust Second Generation Voice: History / Memory / Identity (Poetry, Ekstasis Editions, 2025).

21

Tipton Poetry Journal

Sometimes, A Poem Allison Thorpe is that cranky old man brandishing his cliched cane his curse-blasting ambience suspendered pants riding his ribs hair a white brushfire yammering over his precious lawn when all you want to do is lie on the healing green in the quixotic rain bliss the hymning birds and let your bones soak sweet into the deep earth [First published on the Lexington Poetry Month website (Workhorse)] Allison Thorpe is the author of seven poetry collections and the Family Tree Cozy Mystery series. She lives in Lexington, Kentucky and works as a writing mentor at the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning. You can find her at https://www.allisonthorpe.com.

Aperture Elise Paschen ~ while being filmed on the North Pond

Looking through the lens for a close-up, he frames me, pond in the background.

I glimpse a red-winged blackbird light above a cattail tuft. The filmmaker instructs, “Edge left, inside the shot.”

How different to be watched (like last night across the linen table from you, to be seen, as if for the first time,

22

Tipton Poetry Journal and then to dip into the gleam of an ocean, your open gaze).

I long, instead, to cup the water music, rising blackbird notes, mid-air.

“Camera rolling,” he says. Lake-gusts sweep hair strands across my face.

“Please read your poem, Ho’-e-ga/ Snare, where you walk into the water.”

Behind our shoot, a bus brakes, whooshes.

A loud announcement. Filming’s cut.

I catch, between the reeds, the white-ringed eye of the wood duck. Fledglings scoot.

Further down the path, on rocks, a man proposes.

While she accepts, a photographer snaps.

[Copyright © 2025 by Elise Paschen. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on November 10, 2025, by the Academy of American Poets.]

Elise Paschen is the author of six poetry collections, including Blood Wolf Moon (Red Hen Press, 2025) and Tallchief (Magic City Books Press, 2023). Among her awards are the Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize. Paschen served as executive director of the Poetry Society of America from 1988 until 2001 and cofounded the nationwide Poetry in Motion program. An enrolled member of the Osage Nation, she teaches in the MFA Writing Program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and lives in Chicago.

23

Tipton Poetry Journal

Beach Walk Mary Redman Wind whipped sea-spray mists my face. salts my tongue.

Loose grains of sand scrub soles of bare feet as a breeze lifts a fall of hair across one eye, obscuring half my view.

Today, a robin’s-egg sky, becomes a canvas for swaying palm trees, clad in fronds of green and brown, new and old.

I walk the hardpacked strand littered with jellyfish, their transparent bodies searing under high sun, leaving stink and sting for unwary bare feet.

The tides have left wave patterns of their comings and goings.

Countless shells, abandoned by their animals, lie in wait of transformation.

24

Tipton Poetry Journal

I can feel the ocean in my body too, a briny stew, host of everything wrought by years of living— a seasoned heart, a once firm body turned to draping flesh, eyes blurred upon uncertainty, ears dimmed.

I have cast off so many selves along the cold ridged shore of being, and yet I rise each day to see the sky, blue or grey, to carry this form worn away by increments until one day a new truth lies upon this littered beach of life, its parts no longer readable as me.

Mary Redman is a retired English educator. She currently volunteers for local organizations in the Indianapolis, Indiana community, including the Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields where she has been a docent for many years. Her poems have been published in Ekphrastic Review, Flying Island, Saint Katherine Review, Still Point Arts, Tipton Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. She has received one Pushcart nomination and had three poems accepted to the Inverse Poetry Archive hosted by the Indiana State Library. Her first chapbook, The Conjurer Keeps House, will be published by Finishing Line Press in 2026.

25

Tipton Poetry Journal

Banana Bread Liz Dolan After Billy Collins

To my daughters,the flesh of my flesh, I gave my body, my breast milk, a fine education,high foreheads, beach summers and bumper car rides at Funland.

And they gave me banana bread.

Speckled with chocolate chips.

To fatten you up, they said.

Too much chocolate, said their doting father whom I also gave to them. A life of dieting and exercise and now when one needs the fat, it disappears.

Somewhat like children.

There's never too much chocolate,I sigh.

Nor too much banana bread,I lie.

I bought them braces for spectacular teeth and taught them how to back flip off a balance beam and, in return, I got banana bread.

I gave them fifteen hundred and eighty-six hours of bedtime reading. Good Night Gorilla, Good Night Moon, Good Night,Good Night. I hoped they’d fall asleep before me.They never did.

Once,I recited a grocery bill with a Celtic lilt.

Isn't the medium the message?

And now they give me banana bread.

26

Tipton Poetry Journal

I hoped my readings would inspire a novel or a poetry collection dedicated to me, or, better yet, a book with my name as the title, emblazoned in gold letters. Instead,majoring in economics and engineering, they built bridges,made money.

Each evening I place two slices in the toaster so the first thing I taste at dawn is banana bread and, strange to say, that is almost enough.

A nine time Pushcart nominee in both prose and poetry, Liz Dolan has published two poetry collections. Her ten grandchildren pepper her life. Liz lives in Rehobeth Beach, Delaware.

27

Tipton Poetry Journal

Checkout Neil Carpathios If it weren’t for the glitch with the register I wouldn’t have noticed the small scorpion tattoo on the back of the young woman’s neck in front of me peeking out from under her collar.

Not a thing of beauty but somehow perfect for conjuring my daughter, her own Hindu flower tattoo I discovered one day when she bent over to pick up a fallen pretzel. Her shirt lifted, there it was at the base of her spine above her butt, ornate petals and stem she explained is an umbilical cord connecting the beautiful blossom to earth. I said you mean you are the flower and I am the earth; she laughed.

I wouldn’t have heard the young woman say I love you to someone on her phone like she meant it, not a polite trope, nudging me to imagine who it was and if the sushi and beer in her cart were their dinner.

I wouldn’t have watched her studying gum choices in the aisle settling on Dentyne Ice, which no doubt her lover, mid-kiss, likes to suck and steal with a probing tongue. I wouldn’t have slowed down long enough to feel suddenly happy that a stranger, for the moment, has their person waiting somewhere, maybe arranging dishes, napkins, chopsticks.

The cashier said sorry. The young woman paid and disappeared. Everything sped up again, but not before my daughter touched my cheek.

Neil Carpathios is the author of seven full-length poetry collections, most recently, Lifeaholics Anonymous (Kelsay Books, 2023). His book of original aphorisms, The Lost Fragments of Heraclitus (Wipf and Stock) was also released in 2023. Currently, he is Writer-in-Residence at Malone University in Canton, Ohio.

28

Tipton Poetry Journal

How We Get By Elaine Fowler Palencia I knew a woman who wore two watches, one showing the time where she lived, the other, the time where lived her secret lover I knew a man who wore two pairs of underwear when he went on trips because, he said you just never know when one might split nor did he check into a multi-story hotel in an unfamiliar city until he found out how high the fire ladders reached my aunt, a woman of limited means owned thirty pairs of white stretch slacks so she could dress up or down for anything any time anywhere, and not be embarrassed a neighbor carried his old tuba mouthpiece in his pocket to concerts in case a tuba player suddenly fell ill I knew a woman who only ate ice cream when her husband wasn’t home so she could at least have one secret and another who often said how lucky the boys in juvie were to have a good man like her father guarding them, though, bless his heart, he so often came home smelling of tear gas We all have hedges against the dark-carrying lucky coins, whistling past graveyards crossing ourselves with poems.

Elaine Fowler Palencia, Champaign Ilinois, has published four poetry chapbooks, as well as several works of fiction and nonfiction. She is book review editor of Pegasus, journal of the Kentucky State Poetry Society, and a member of the Glass Room Poets of Champaign-Urbana.

Her work has received eight Pushcart Prize nominations, including one from Tipton Poetry Journal.

29

Tipton Poetry Journal

November Insomnia George Freek Swallows rise in the air making tuneless music which drifts to who knows where, and fades away, as if it was never here.

Among the dying leaves, rain whispers a different song.

If we could hear them would leaves sigh before they die?

But they’re only leaves.

The moon, ravaged by time, is nothing but a stone, showing neither hope nor mercy, and when I look at it on a desperate night, it is incapable of even looking back at me.

30

Tipton Poetry Journal

Through A Microscopic Lens George Freek A new moon does not see the autumn decay into winter on the earth beneath it.ƒmaca My thoughts sink like stones to the bottom of a pond, where microbes exist for a few hours before they die.

The stars appear to wander the paths in that sky like lost children, who remain homeless, knowing nothing of where they are, or what they were meant to do, observed by the gods for their curiosity, as we derive pleasure, observing the animals in a zoo.

George Freek is a poet/playwright living in Belvidere, Illionois. George Freek's poetry appears in numerous journals and reviews. His poem "Night Thoughts" was recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize. His poem "Enigmatic Variations" was also recently nominated for Best of the Net. His collection Melancholia is published by Red Wolf Editions. George Freek also published plays. His plays are published by Playscripts and Off The Wall Plays.

31

Tipton Poetry Journal

Long Distance Phone Call

John Grey I have your face on my phone but it looks awkward, not quite you, with occasional blur, blotchy color, words and lip movement that don’t quite sync.

It’s technology and it has to be better than just voice to communication.

At least, that’s what it says in the tiny booklet that came with my mobile.

Who knows, maybe someday telecommunications will have the wherewithal to summon up a hologram of the one I’m speaking to, deposit a fluttery floating you in this room I’m calling from.

And there could come a time when it could break you down into molecules, ship you by satellite to my address, reassemble you in my arms.

But, for now, I have to deal with your words, “Love you” crackling in my tiny speaker as your face fades away.

The screen goes dark.

I’m left holding the shell of us.

32

Tipton Poetry Journal

Ship in a Bottle

John Grey Patience he learned from waiting for his old man to stumble home from the bar.

The skill was intrinsic, inherited.

His father’s hands were another name for attention to detail before the shakes took over.

He found the bottle just lying in the street.

The neck was narrow and the base was wide. Perfect.

He saved his pennies to acquire the ship ingredients.

They were 50% off in the model shop.

With an ancient toothbrush, he scrubbed that bottle clean of dust and grime.

Then, stealing a little paint from the garage, his nimble brush daubed the insides ocean blue.

“What you doing?” his father slurred.

But his head was bent deep in construction and he didn’t hear.

The balsa wood was delicate. The paper could easily tear.

And the thread was thin.

His young eyes, small fingers, connected in a way they never could for solving math problems, or using the word “susceptible” in a sentence.

He had no fancy tools for doing the work so he borrowed his mother’s tweezers.

The bulk of the boat just cleared the opening.

Then, with wire and thread, he secured the paper mast, the tiny rigging.

A cork that smelled of booze somehow was the perfect size to seal the opening.

It was his father’s only contribution.

John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident now living in Rhode Island, recently published in Shift, River And South, and Flights. Latest books, Bittersweet, Subject Matters and Between Two Fires are available through Amazon. Work upcoming in Rush, White Wall Review and Trampoline.

33

Tipton Poetry Journal

The unworn suit Mark Vogel A brown suit, maybe unaffordable, purchased from now defunct Macy’s, as unselfish Mother faded, losing breath and color, though remaining until the end the teacher explaining without a lecture how the god-mind designs coming and going.

Her lips without moving guiding us pretty clueless grown kids trying to freeze the world/ make it ours even as she prepared to leave.

Strange, waiting half a life to own a suit, which hangs unworn five years later in the closet, carrying the baggage of quiet angst, worrying that aging will mean it no longer fits/ or become discolored with closet dust/ revealing too much of a life lived.

For a suit should fit like it is newly tailored— ready to appear in pictures, the smiling winners gathered close, at least for one moment defining us as all we could still be.

Always so much of the past looms, momentum of revelation like a wave about to wash over.

Us kids sitting with mother for nine days (waiting), time enough to see ahead the handshakes, and a liturgy honed from time/me dressed and clean in my new suit at her funeral, which ultimately I would miss/because six hundred miles away students needed a guiding hand to close out their semester. Living Mother even at the end would have understood how no one else

34

Tipton Poetry Journal could take my place in the classroom, because she taught by example that none of us took precedence over the greater needs.

Even in dying her quiet eyes seeing motley trails glowing from afar. Maybe noting my ironic (suit) ownership, a sign of great wealth, though from the beginning suspect, more spectacle than substance. Even in the last blinks we knew she had earned the right to smile and nod, eyes alive in the communal flow.

Mark Vogel lives at the back of a Blue Ridge holler with his wife, Susan Weinberg, an accomplished fiction and creative non-fiction writer, and two foster sons. He currently is an Emeritus Professor of English at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina.

Poems and short stories have appeared in several dozen literary journals

35

Tipton Poetry Journal

Bridge to Mecca Lori Zavada Mecca Covered Bridge, named for its Saudi Arabian immigrants and the thriving town of its time, spans 176 feet above Big Raccoon Creek in Parke County, Indiana.

A Victorian era lady in the autumn of her life, freely exposes her mid-section to ventilate an aging frame.

Working-class stock, artless, muted red, she is ordinary, and willing to please.

Few people know the kingposts and arches of Mecca Covered Bridge once carried Arabia on her shoulders.

Saudi immigrants on the clay riverbanks of Indiana, Mecca carried them when no one else would.

She supported progress in a town that flourished with mills and coal mines, pork-packers and clay plants, a settlement divided, by floods and fires, religion and race, always on the move.

36

Tipton Poetry Journal Bypassed since ’65, she straddles Raccoon Creek, settled in beneath eastern hemlocks, eager to resume work.

Loose metal slaps the old bones of her empty cavity, echoing on a cool October zephyr, I am still here, let me bear your load.

Lori Zavada has written professionally for magazines, newspapers, websites, social media platforms, and medical and mental health non-profit organizations, but she’s passionate about free verse poetry. Her work is published in regional anthologies including Of Poets and Poetry and the Emerald Coast Review; literary journals such as Silly Goose Press, The Lake, Gyroscope, Amethyst Review, Macrame Literary Journal, and Wild Whispers Poetry, and The Pen Woman national magazine. She is the Poet Laureate of Emerald Coast Pen Women in Northwest Florida. Lori married a Hoosier and visits the midwestern state every year. She always leaves inspired to write about Indiana history, people, nature and charming small towns. Find her latest co-authored collection of stories and poems on Amazon: Awake in the Sacred Night: Stories and Poems.

37

Tipton Poetry Journal

Making Hay Lynette Lamp The sun warms greenish-yellow cylinders of silage, their sisters wrapped and stacked in plastic. Cut, tedded, raked into windrows then baled. They dot the land like giant jelly rolls, cooled on freshly groomed fields. Haymaking spins gold from alfalfa and grass, makes winter chow for cattle. I once had a boyfriend who baled all summer, arranged neat cubes in Quonsets, his arms muscled from moving them around.

He took me on hayrides. Straw rides, really. the tufts poked us from behind while we passed a flask. He held me close under soft blankets.

These larger, round bales await a tractor to move them. Some are left outside, outer layers sacrificed to the rain and snow. Weathered, like me, and no longer moved by young men.

38

Tipton Poetry Journal

Your Mother Said Lynette Lamp there is beauty in the brown, that time between the green and the snow’s gleam.

I didn’t believe it. Life was a meadow of wildflowers. we could pick any color, forge any path. Now, places have been seen, things done. We’re waiting for winter. After a simple supper, we pour a decaf, drape wool throws from a distant trip to Wales over our laps, crack open books. Our slippers peak out from footrests of matching recliners. The TV sits abandoned, mocking us with its giant empty eye. Jazz, a musical genre we can agree on, sometimes filters through the room, but mostly the only sounds are pages flipping, the fire hissing in the grate. We are old people in training.

Whoever thought this would be enough.

Lynette Lamp MD, MFA is a practicing family physician in St. Charles, Minnesota.

Lynette’s poems have been published in JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Association), Annals of Internal Medicine, The Pharos, Dermanities, Tipton Poetry Journal, The Healing Muse and Pulse and forthcoming in The Louisville Review. She retreats to her farm in Iowa whenever she can. Please visit her at lynettelamp.com.

39

Tipton Poetry Journal

I Have Never Gotten a Tattoo, Never Seen One Created Jenny Kalahar I imagine the vibrating needle must go deep.

Not depositing ink into a vein, not into interstitium or bone; not adhering to hair follicles, not splashing sideways or spreading too far.

The needle has no intention of causing ectodermal damage or leaving a scar, but it will plunge its supply of ink deep enough to stay for a lifetime, fading to black or gray but remaining, the image forever recording a poor decision, a good one, a portrait of loss, regret, pride, joy, or remembrance.

The tattooed carry this conglomeration of pigment into the crematorium to be released as ash or into the grave to mummify.

In the afterlife, angelic wings swirl with skulls and once-important dates, curvy women, police badges, cartoon characters, with semicolons, with tears.

40

Tipton Poetry Journal

I have never gotten a tattoo, have never seen one created.

I never will.

My skin carries all loss, regret, pride, joy, and remembrance with me in secret, unrevealed to any lover until they close their eyes.

Jenny Kalahar is the author of numerous novels and collections and is the editor and publisher of Last Stanza Poetry Journal. Jenny and her husband, poet Patrick, are used & rare booksellers in central Indiana.

41

Tipton Poetry Journal

Covert Ops Arvilla Fee I sink further into the booth, holding the menu in front of my beet-red face.

Stealth has never been my strong suit, what with my over-sized feet, spindly giraffe legs, and sharp-angled elbows. But still— it’s all come down to this. Me, my coppery-red hair shoved under a bobbed blonde wig, my nerves twitching like live wires hanging one inch above a rain-slicked road.

Him, three booths back, closer to the restroom, with her— the real blonde, a little too buxomy, a little too loud with her screech-owl laugh and effusive praise for my soon-to-be-ex. Bet he loves it, though, to be front and center in her transparent mirror, always the narcissist, flashing those pearly veneers.

Then it’s over… a discrete walk to the bathroom surveillance shots on my cellphone camera my exit, stage right Afterwards, I walk through the park, my whole body tingling, as if I’ve just had sex—only miles better!

And, I swear, the cherry trees have never looked more beautiful Arvilla Fee, from Dayton, Ohio, has been published in numerous presses, and her poetry books, The Human Side, This is Life, and Mosaic: A Million Little Pieces are available on Amazon. Arvilla’s life advice: Never travel without snacks. To learn more, visit her website and her new magazine: https://soulpoetry7.com/

42

Tipton Poetry Journal

Black Sheep

Heather Sager I am the black sheep of my family because I want time alone to think and read because I don’t want to be around people all of the time But sometimes I go out for fresh air and for living Today I’m under the forest green trees of the park An accordion wheezes It’s a feast day

Heather Sager lives in Illinois where she writes poetry and fiction. Her most recent poems appear in Haight Ashbury Literary Journal, Pineberry Literary Journal, SLAB, Straylight, Poets' Espresso Review, Trouvaille Review, and more journals.

43

Tipton Poetry Journal

Black Bear Research Mark MacAllister — Hattie's Cove/Lake Superior,Pukaskwa National Park (October 2024)

Huge holy boreal forest shivering aspen poplar and jack pine all that still I'm taken in by a pile of black bear scat recently dropped and berry-filled already staining the surrounding shore sand purple had this been 2005 had this been Cade's Cove eastern Tennessee I would have scooped a sample into a sterile bag recorded the date and lat/long packed it out with several others to Knoxville handed everything over to a grad student who by the time I picked out gifts for my kids (stuffed animal bright orange Volunteers jersey) then driven seven hours home would tell me which bears those were the names of their parents how far each had wandered from its birthden but in the bright here and now there’s more I wish to know

44

Tipton Poetry Journal

have you seen your shape in the sky

do you stack your paws atop your nose while asleep why did you choose the same spot as I to come out from the safe trees and finally do all the leaves falling at this moment sound like rain to you too

Mark MacAllister grew up in northern Illinois, spent a great deal of formative time on his grandparents' dairy farm in southwest Wisconsin's Driftless region, and learned to write at Oberlin College. Mark now lives in Pittsboro, North Carolina but travels often to the Wisconsin Northwoods and to Michigan's Upper Peninsula to hike and bike the backcountry.

45

Tipton Poetry Journal

Lawson Creek Park Chase Harker It is quiet here at Lawson Creek Park Now that the carnies have packed up Our county fair, unfastened the spokes From its Ferris wheel, the rearing mustangs From their carousel, folded down the flimsy Cotton candy stands, and crammed the tired Livestock into long, narrow trailers.

It is late October. Wisps of Spanish moss Whisper like mute wind chimes above my head While a red, deflated balloon caught by A low twig laps the river like the tongue Of a whitetail doe. I am alone Save for some varsity boys on the grass Cleating a soccer ball between broken nets And an old, shirtless man in a white rowboat— We nod toward each other, not permitting a word, Keeping the quiet, as he oars along the shore.

We know the bright eyes of dumbstruck deer On highways; We know the howls of red wolves Pitched through wood lines; We know the eternal debris Blown into roosts, nests, and drays—

46

Tipton Poetry Journal

And we know that each of us knows it well,

That a few hours later, in the county over, Spotlights will be slanted across the night sky To signal, far and wide, that the fair has come; We know the high tails of frightened beasts on the run, We know the deep divots they create When music is sprayed out of speakers–– Piercing the countryside.

Chase Harker is a poet from New Bern, North Carolina and a student in the MFA program at UNC Wilmington. His work has previously appeared in Flying South, BarBar, In Parentheses, and elsewhere.

47

Tipton Poetry Journal

Geriatrics Patrick Theron Erickson In old age we lose tissue It's more than the loss of muscle tone It's the loss of muscle tone because we lose muscle mass we lose tissue Eventually we lose muscle memory and the use of our limbs and we suffer cognitive decline because we lose brain tissue Heaven help us if we fail to find a tissue match in our vain search for a tissue transplant and compatible donor It's as though we're digitized and lose terabytes of data in a data dump Remind me of that when it comes to being trans humanized I'll deal with the slack jaws the same way I deal with the slackened pace thank you

48

Tipton Poetry Journal

namely get on with it get over it

go along to get along before it gets all over you like a cheap suit.

Missing the Mark Patrick Theron Erickson A long-felt grief hollows out a home in the closet you never come out of the way reptiles do in your cellar nestled among the Mason jars making a reserve for themselves among your preserves the way grief does among the mothballs and the moths straining toward the light the way moths do leaving their carcasses behind like spent cartridges missing the mark.

Patrick Theron Erickson, a resident of Garland, Texas, a Tree City, just south of Duck Creek, is a retired parish pastor put out to pasture himself. Besides a chapbook, Better Late Than Never (The Orchard Street Press, 2022), his work has appeared in the anthology, Sharing This Delicate Bread: Selections from Sheila-Na-Gig online 2016-2021, and in Tipton Poetry Journal, Grey Sparrow Journal, and Sheila-Na-Gig online, among other publications.

49

Tipton Poetry Journal

It's Too Soon Robin Gobetz It’s late now, the dog needs walking.

Instead, I stay. To watch. And wait.

Our room is like a surround-sound of beeps, sighs and clicks. A code blue echoes through the corridor. Footsteps rush past our door.

I picture our beginning years standing side by side in a hotel hall, waiting to hear the opening ding of elevator doors. I must have sighed my anxiousness for he squeezed my hand.

Where were we? Los Angeles?

Does it matter?

I’m tired. All I want is bed.

But I know I’ll stay awake, so I listen in the dark for the reassuring beeps, like a metronome for his heart.

The beeps stay steady. Just like him.

The Highlands became our favorite place to get away. We made frequent day trips to the Isle of Sky. We’d stop for lunch in roadside pubs.

I wish I’d been better to him then.

50

Tipton Poetry Journal

He moans again. Squeezes the call button in his left hand, a flashing white SOS, the code a plea for pain relief.

I step into the hall, watch for help to come. He’ll have to wait another hour, the nurse says when she arrives.

It’s just too soon.

How right you are, I ache to say.

It’s too late now. So I’ll stay.

To watch. And wait.

Robin Gobetz has work in The Flying Island and Silver Birch Press and lives in Beech Grove, Indiana.

51

Tipton Poetry Journal

Mandala Tanya Gick A poppyseed pod from my sister’s garden, chalice-shaped and weathered grey brown, freckled black along the belly.

Tiny umbrels hold aloft a wafer of frozen energy, a miniature sun, radiant expansion mimicking birth of universe as a child imitates a parent.

This portico arrays from the top of the vessel, a circle drowning all the directions at once, lost in the primitive holy eye of the center.

Tanya Gick lives in Bloomigton, Indiana, with her cats, Mabel and Pancake.

My Doppelganger Nolo Segundo We don’t meet often and that’s okay-it’s hard to meet yourself, harder still when your twin looks some 50 years younger and relentlessly reminds you of all the mistakes you made in your time of insouciance and good looks when you got pretty much whatever you went after—girls, jobs, friends… and all of them you left, sooner or later, one way or another...until that day you were completely alone, with madness pulling you one way and death the other….

52

Tipton Poetry Journal My doppleganger knows all this because he was there, he has always been there and now I know I should have asked him for help—but before I jumped, before I took that leap not of faith but despair, I did not, no, could not believe him real and so I did not know he was my endless being, my atom of eternity, my lost soul...

Nolo Segundo, pen name of L. J. Carber, became a published poet in his 70's in over 250 literary journals in 21 countries. A trade publisher has released 3 collections in paperback: The Enormity of Existence [2020]; Of Ether and Earth [2021]; and Soul Songs [2022].

These 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 since Plato have called the soul. Nominated for the Pushcart Prize and thrice for Best of the Net, he's a retired English/ESL teacher [America, Japan, Taiwan, Cambodia] who's been married 45 years to a smart and beautiful Taiwanese woman. He lives in New Jersey.

53

Tipton Poetry Journal

Contributor Biographies Roger D. Anderson lives with his wife and soulmate, Judy, in Omaha, Nebraska. Each day is a new adventure in their journey together to somewhere. Credits include Fine Lines, Westward Quarterly, Nebraska Life, Cholla Needles, Chronogram, Scarlet Leaf Review, The Stray Branch, and Time of Singing.

Erica Anderson-Senter writes from Fort Wayne, Indiana. Her first collection of poetry, Midwestern Poet's Incomplete Guide to Symbolism, was published by EastOver Press in 2021. Her work has appeared in boats against the current, BRAWL lit, SWING, and others.

She was the commissioned artist for Acres Land Trust in 2023 writing poetry inspired by Wing Haven Nature Preserve. Erica curates and hosts poetry events around Northeast Indiana and has been in artistic conversation with visual artists in a few exhibitions. Erica teaches Creative Writing at Purdue Fort Wayne and offers writing workshops, courses, and tutoring with her partner. She has her MFA from the Writing Seminars at Bennington College in Bennington, Vermont.

Charlie Brice won the 2020 Field Guide Poetry Magazine Poetry Contest and placed third in the 2021 Allen Ginsberg Poetry Prize. His ninth full-length poetry collection is Tragedy in the Arugula Aisle (Arroyo Seco Press, 2025). His poetry has been nominated for the Best of Net Anthology and the Pushcart Prize and has appeared in Atlanta Review, The Honest Ulsterman, Ibbetson Street, Chiron Review, The MacGuffin, and elsewhere. He lives in Pittsburgh.

Joyce Brinkman, Indiana Poet Laureate 2002-2008, believes in poetry as public art.

Color and light have inspired permanent public installations through collaborations with glass artists and painters, while the colors black and white figure prominently in her paintings. Her latest printed works include Seasons of Sharing: A Kasen Renku Collaboration with the poets of this chapbook and Elizabeth Barrett Browning Illuminated by the Message in the Literary Portals to Prayer Series. Joyce has received fellowships from the Mary Anderson Center for the Arts, the Vermont Studio, and the Indianapolis Arts Council.

Neil Carpathios is the author of seven full-length poetry collections, most recently, Lifeaholics Anonymous (Kelsay Books, 2023). His book of original aphorisms, The Lost Fragments of Heraclitus (Wipf and Stock) was also released in 2023. Currently, he is Writer-in-Residence at Malone University in Canton, Ohio.

A nine time Pushcart nominee in both prose and poetry, Liz Dolan has published two poetry collections. Her ten grandchildren pepper her life. Liz lives in Rehobeth Beach, Delaware.

54

Tipton Poetry Journal

Patrick Theron Erickson, a resident of Garland, Texas, a Tree City, just south of Duck Creek, is a retired parish pastor put out to pasture himself. Besides a chapbook, Better Late Than Never (The Orchard Street Press, 2022), his work has appeared in the anthology, Sharing This Delicate Bread: Selections from Sheila-Na-Gig online 2016-2021, and in Tipton Poetry Journal, Grey Sparrow Journal, and Sheila-Na-Gig online, among other publications.

Arvilla Fee, from Dayton, Ohio, has been published in numerous presses, and her poetry books, The Human Side, This is Life, and Mosaic: A Million Little Pieces are available on Amazon. Arvilla’s life advice: Never travel without snacks. To learn more, visit her website and her new magazine: https://soulpoetry7.com/ George Freek is a poet/playwright living in Belvidere, Illionois. George Freek's poetry appears in numerous journals and reviews. His poem "Night Thoughts" was recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize. His poem "Enigmatic Variations" was also recently nominated for Best of the Net. His collection Melancholia is published by Red Wolf Editions. George Freek also published plays. His plays are published by Playscripts and Off The Wall Plays.

Tanya Gick lives in Bloomigton, Indiana, with her cats, Mabel and Pancake.

Robin Gobetz has work in The Flying Island and Silver Birch Press and lives in Beech Grove, Indiana.

John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident now living in Rhode Island, recently published in Shift, River And South, and Flights. Latest books, Bittersweet, Subject Matters and Between Two Fires are available through Amazon. Work upcoming in Rush, White Wall Review and Trampoline.

Mark B. Hamilton (MFA, University of Montana) writes eco-poetry, often focused on theriparian zone of the Ohio and Missouri Rivers, where he has traveled extensively by kayak and rowing dory. His interests include: First Nations cosmologies, pre-industrial America, and the poetics of climate change. His poetry volumes include: Lake, River, Mountain (Cornerstone Press, 2024), the chapbook Upstream (Finishing Line Press, 2024), and Oyo: The Beautiful River (Shanti Arts Publishing, 2020). A forthcoming book of traditional verse, 1803: The Wintering, based upon Captain William Clark’s journal entries while at Camp Dubois on the Mississippi, will be published in January 2026. He lives in Richmond, Indiana.

Chase Harker is a poet from New Bern, North Carolina and a student in the MFA program at UNC Wilmington. His work has previously appeared in Flying South, BarBar, In Parentheses, and elsewhere.

55

Tipton Poetry Journal

Ruth Holzer is the author of nine chapbooks, most recently, Float (Kelsay Books), Home and Away (dancing girl press) and Living in Laconia (Gyroscope Press). Her poems have appeared in Blue Unicorn, California Quarterly, Freshwater, POEM, Slant and previously in Tipton Poetry Journal. A multiple Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee, among her awards are the Edgar Allan Poe Memorial Prize, the Tanka Splendor Award and the Ito En Art of Haiku Contest Grand Prize. She lives in Virginia.

Jenny Kalahar is the author of numerous novels and collections and is the editor and publisher of Last Stanza Poetry Journal. Jenny and her husband, poet Patrick, are used & rare booksellers in central Indiana.

Philip C. Kolin is the Distinguished Professor of English Emeritus and Editor Emeritus of the Southern Quarterly at the University of Southern Mississippi. He has published 15 collections of poems including most recently Reaching Forever (Poiema Series, Cascade Books, 2019), Delta Tears: Poems (Main Street Rag, 2021), Wholly God's (Wind & Water Press, 2021), and Black Trauma: Resistance Poems about Black History (Third World Press, 2023). The 12th edition of his business writing textbook, Successful Writing at Work, was published last year by Cengage Learning.

Dr. Carolyn Kreiter-Foronda served as Poet Laureate of Virginia from 2006-2008. She has co-edited three anthologies, co-authored a poem-play, and published nine books of poetry, including The Embrace: Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, winner of the international Art in Literature: The Mary Lynn Kotz Award. She has also received the Ellen Anderson Award, a Virginia Cultural Laureate Award, multiple first place awards from the Chesapeake Bay Branch of the National League of American Pen Women, an Edgar Allan Poe Poetry Award, among others.

Lynette Lamp MD, MFA is a practicing family physician in St. Charles, Minnesota.

Lynette’s poems have been published in JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Association), Annals of Internal Medicine, The Pharos, Dermanities, Tipton Poetry Journal, The Healing Muse and Pulse and forthcoming in The Louisville Review. She retreats to her farm in Iowa whenever she can. Please visit her at lynettelamp.com.

Mark MacAllister grew up in northern Illinois, spent a great deal of formative time on his grandparents' dairy farm in southwest Wisconsin's Driftless region, and learned to write at Oberlin College. Mark now lives in Pittsboro, North Carolina but travels often to the Wisconsin Northwoods and to Michigan's Upper Peninsula to hike and bike the backcountry.

Elaine Fowler Palencia, Champaign Ilinois, has published four poetry chapbooks, as well as several works of fiction and nonfiction. She is book review editor of Pegasus, journal of the Kentucky State Poetry Society, and a member of the Glass Room Poets of ChampaignUrbana. Her work has received eight Pushcart Prize nominations, including one from Tipton Poetry Journal.

56

Tipton Poetry Journal

Elise Paschen is the author of six poetry collections, including Blood Wolf Moon (Red Hen Press, 2025) and Tallchief (Magic City Books Press, 2023). Among her awards are the Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize. Paschen served as executive director of the Poetry Society of America from 1988 until 2001 and cofounded the nationwide Poetry in Motion program. An enrolled member of the Osage Nation, she teaches in the MFA Writing Program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and lives in Chicago.

Tia Paul-Louis is a fiction writer and poet from Florida. She began experimenting with songwriting at age 11 and later felt a deeper connection to poetry. Her themes portray family life, gender role controversies, mental health, and spiritual values. She admires the freedom of expression in most forms of art such as music, acting, and painting.

Timothy Pilgrim, a Montana native, age 78, living in Bellingham, Washington, has several hundred acceptances from U.S. journals such as Seattle Review, Sierra Nevada Review, Tipton Poetry Journal and Santa Ana River Review, and international journals such as Windsor Review in Canada and Prole Press in the U.K.-- and two books of poetry. See timothypilgrim.org.

Patrick T. Reardon, who was a Chicago Tribune reporter for 32 years and is the author of seven poetry collections. His latest is Every Marred Thing: A Time in America, the winner of the 2024 Faulkner-Wisdom Prize from the Pirate’s Alley Faulkner Society of New Orleans (Lavender Ink). He is a five-time nominee in poetry for a Pushcart Prize. His poetry has appeared in America, RHINO, Commonweal, After Hours, Autumn Sky, Burningword Literary Journal and other journals.

Mary Redman is a retired English educator. She currently volunteers for local organizations in the Indianapolis, Indiana community, including the Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields where she has been a docent for many years. Her poems have been published in Ekphrastic Review, Flying Island, Saint Katherine Review, Still Point Arts, Tipton Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. She has received one Pushcart nomination and had three poems accepted to the Inverse Poetry Archive hosted by the Indiana State Library. Her first chapbook, The Conjurer Keeps House, will be published by Finishing Line Press in 2026.

Janet Reed is the author of Blue Exhaust (FLP, 2019). She is also a multi-year Pushcart Prize and Best of the Web nominee. Her work has appeared in Sow’s Ear Review, Emry’s, Common Ground, Tipton Poetry Journal, and others. She taught creative writing, literature, and composition and worked as a family success coach in Boone County, Missouri. She thinks a lot about how to make metaphors tell stories while walking her dogs.

Mykyta Ryzhykh lives in Ukraine, has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and has been published any times in the journals Dzvin, Dnipro, Bukovinian magazine, Polutona, Rechport, Topos, Articulation, Formaslov, Literature Factory, Literary Chernihiv, Tipton Poetry Journal, Stone Poetry Journal, Divot journal, dyst journal, Superpresent Magazine, Allegro Poetry Magazine, Alternate Route, Better Than Starbucks Poetry & Fiction Journal, Littoral Press, Book of Matches, on the portals Litсenter, Ice Floe Press and Soloneba, in the Ukrainian literary newspaper.

57

Tipton Poetry Journal

Heather Sager lives in Illinois where she writes poetry and fiction. Her most recent poems appear in Haight Ashbury Literary Journal, Pineberry Literary Journal, SLAB, Straylight, Poets' Espresso Review, Trouvaille Review, and more journals.

Leslie Schultz (Northfield, Minnesota) has five collections of poetry; of these, Geranium Lake: Poems on Art and Art-Making (Kelsay Books) is her most recent. Her poetry has appeared widely, in such journals as Poet Lore, Midwest Quarterly, Naugatuck River Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Tipton Poetry Journal, and Blue Unicorn. She serves as a judge for the Maria W. Faust Sonnet Contest. In addition to poems, she publishes photographs, essays, and fiction; makes quilts and soups; and happily mucks about in a garden plagued by shade, rabbits, and walnut trees.

Nolo Segundo, pen name of L. J. Carber, became a published poet in his 70's in over 250 literary journals in 21 countries. A trade publisher has released 3 collections in paperback: The Enormity of Existence [2020]; Of Ether and Earth [2021]; and Soul Songs [2022].

These 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 since Plato have called the soul. Nominated for the Pushcart Prize and thrice for Best of the Net, he's a retired English/ESL teacher [America, Japan, Taiwan, Cambodia] who's been married 45 years to a smart and beautiful Taiwanese woman and lives in New Jersey.

Dave Seter is an environmental engineer, poet, essayist, and translator. He is the author of the full length poetry collection Don’t Sing to Me of Electric Fences (Cherry Grove, 2021).

His new chapbook is Somewhere West of the Mississippi (Mammoth Publications, 2025).

He is currently serving as Sonoma County (California) Poet Laureate 2024-2026. More at: https://daveseter.com 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 25 books, including 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), 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), Acting on the Island (Stories, Pottersfield Press, 2022), As You Continue to Wait (Poetry, Ekstasis Editions, 2022), and My Post-Holocaust Second Generation Voice: History / Memory / Identity (Poetry, Ekstasis Editions, 2025).

Wally Swist’s books include Huang Po and the Dimensions of Love (Southern Illinois University Press, 2012), selected by Yusef Komunyakaa for the 2011 Crab Orchard Open Poetry Competition, and A Bird Who Seems to Know Me: Poems Regarding Birds and Nature, winner of the 2018 Ex Ophidia Poetry Prize. Recent essays, poems, and translations have appeared in Chicago Quarterly Review, Commonweal, The Comstock Review, Frontier Poetry, Healing Muse, Illuminations, La Piccioletta Barca (U.K.), Pensive, Sunspot Lit, and Your Impossible Voice. Forthcoming titles include If You’re the Dreamer, I’m the Dream: Selected Translations from Rilke’s Book of Hours from Finishing Line Press and Kelsay Books will publish Aperture, poems regarding caregiving his wife through Alzheimer’s.

58

Tipton Poetry Journal Allison Thorpe is the author of seven poetry collections and the Family Tree Cozy Mystery series. She lives in Lexington, Kentucky and works as a writing mentor at the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning. You can find her at https://www.allisonthorpe.com.

Jim Tilley lives in New York State and has published four full-length collections of poetry and a novel with Red Hen Press. His short memoir, The Elegant Solution, was published as a Ploughshares Solo. Five of his poems have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. His most recent poetry collection, Ripples in the Fabric of the Universe: New & Selected Poems, was published in June 2024. His forthcoming collection, When Godot Arrived, will be published in 2026.

Mark Vogel lives at the back of a Blue Ridge holler with his wife, Susan Weinberg, an accomplished fiction and creative non-fiction writer, and two foster sons. He currently is an Emeritus Professor of English at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina.

Poems and short stories have appeared in several dozen literary journals Lori Zavada has written professionally for magazines, newspapers, websites, social media platforms, and medical and mental health non-profit organizations, but she’s passionate about free verse poetry. Her work is published in regional anthologies including Of Poets and Poetry and the Emerald Coast Review; literary journals such as Silly Goose Press, The Lake, Gyroscope, Amethyst Review, Macrame Literary Journal, and Wild Whispers Poetry, and The Pen Woman national magazine. She is the Poet Laureate of Emerald Coast Pen Women in Northwest Florida. Lori married a Hoosier and visits the midwestern state every year. She always leaves inspired to write about Indiana history, people, nature and charming small towns. Find her latest co-authored collection of stories and poems on Amazon: Awake in the Sacred Night: Stories and Poems.

59

Tipton Poetry Journal

Editor Barry Harris is editor of the Tipton Poetry Journal and several 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. 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.

60