Weird Old Bitch
goodbye Elsie
you were one weird bitch
sad sack mother
wicked old witch
much too sick
hump on your back
sack of potatoes
walking stick
when you bellowed
I shucked and jived
you’re in a better place
so am I
Joan Barasovska lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. She hosts a monthly poetry series at McIntyre’s Books and serves on the Board of the North Carolina Poetry Society. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Kakalak, San Pedro River Review, Flying South, Crossing the Rift, Red Fez, Speckled Trout Review, Main Street Rag, Redheaded Stepchild Magazine, and other journals and anthologies. Joan has been nominated for Best of the Net and twice for a Pushcart Prize. She is the author of Birthing Age (Finishing Line Press, 2018), Carrying Clare (Main Street Rag, 2022), and Orange Tulips (Redhawk Publications, 2022).
Irish Woods
(After an unnamed painting by Kathy Young-Connelly)
Sheep pause on path
colored by puddles and muddy
shadows, sleeved by a palette
gleaned from eager seasons—
vernal yellow, classic lilac,
a pinch of holly berry red—
dancers in a knee-deep
quadrille of greens.
Trees orphaned of birds
covet undergrowth’s color, raise
limbs—umber and soot gray—
like Pharisees praying.
Nancy K. Jentsch’s chapbook Authorized Visitors (Cherry Grove Collections) and the collaborative ekphrastic chapbook Frame and Mount the Sky (Finishing Line Press), in which her poetry appears, were published in 2017. Since 2008, when she began writing, her work has appeared in both online and print journals, such as Amethyst Review, Eclectica, Panoply, Tiferet Journal, and Zingara Poetry Review and also in numerous anthologies. In 2020 she received an Arts Enrichment Grant from the Kentucky Foundation for Women. Her collection Between the Rows was published by Shanti Arts in 2022. More information is available on her website: https://jentsch8.wixsite.com/
Summer Plums
purple-black
carmine
blush
green-gold
skins
caress
dewy
flesh
eat
my
heart
out
plumbed
Fay L. Loomis was a nemophilist (haunter of the woods) until her hikes in upstate New York were abruptly ended by a stroke. With an additional nudge from the pandemic, she lives a particularly quiet life. A member of the Stone Ridge Library Writers and the Rat’s Ass Review Workshop, her poems and prose have recently appeared in Al-Khemica Poetica, Medusa’s Kitchen, Lothlorien Poetry Journal, As It Ought to Be, Stick Figure Poetry, Mad Swirl, Breath and Shadow, Amethyst Review, Bindweed, True Chili, Blue Pepper, Sledgehammer Lit, Spillwords, and Rats Ass Review.
The Beautiful Story
Don’t say this is a beautiful story.
Don’t say he died in his prime.
Don’t say he could have had another good twenty years.
Don’t say he was marked by the curse of an ancient sin
coming home. There was no curse,
there was no sin.
Don’t say Western medicine let him down.
Don’t say there was still some way for him to live.
Don’t say I failed to give everything I had.
Don’t say his doctors didn’t take him seriously.
Don’t say anyone blocked him getting all he needed.
Don’t say he took hospice too soon, fooled them all
and thrived for another decade.
Don’t say his death was tragic or comic or absurd.
Don’t say he was full of life and laughter to the end.
Don’t say he died a good death.
Tell how he wanted to go out to breakfast at 2 a.m.
and was enraged that he couldn’t.
Tell how he realized, furious and defeated,
he would never again get out of that bed.
Tell how he hated my leaving the room so much,
he cursed the flowing Schubert piano sonata
I put on to bridge my absence.
Tell how he begged me to help him go home,
though we were home.
Tell how he left a voicemail accusing me of leaving him
alone in an airport parking garage.
Tell how I keep that voicemail,
my only way left to hear his voice.
Karen Greenbaum-Maya is a retired clinical psychologist, former German major and restaurant reviewer, and two-time Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee. Her work has appeared in journals including Comstock Poetry Review, B O D Y, Rappahannock Poetry Review, CHEST, and Spillway. Her collections include three chapbooks, Burrowing Song, Eggs Satori, and, Kafka’s Cat (Kattywompus Press), and, The Book of Knots and their Untying (Kelsay Books). A collection of poems about her late husband’s illness and death from lung cancer in 2018, The Beautiful Leaves, was published in August 2023 by Bamboo Dart Press, and is also available through Amazon. She co-curates Fourth Saturdays, a poetry series in Claremont, California, as well as Garden of Verses, an annual day-long reading of nature poems in Claremont’s California Botanic Garden.
Small
—for Carol
On one coneflower, one bee
becomes nothing
against the far reaches of a field.
An astronomer dwindles
beside the pages of her calculations.
Sometimes I cower
before the rumbling power
of a coming thunderstorm.
On bad days I feel as if I’ve been caught
and numbered by the state:
nine assigned numbers
for my social security.
But good days or bad,
there are these nine years—
how fine to be living them with you.
Our love is so small;
what is it against history—
sheer, unending cruelty and grief?
There is a flower that will open
only for today. A bird is singing
and will be dead by evening.
A woman is kissing her children
though soldiers will come at midnight.
I say love is good dirt,
is the imagination at the impossible
edge of the universe, is the seed
that follows the flower and the bee,
is the soldier who calls it quits—
the silence at roll call.
Matthew Murrey has published poems widely – most recently in the lickety~split, One Art, and The Shore. He’s also published several poems in Redheaded Stepchild over the years. In 2019 his debut collection of poetry, Bulletproof, was published by Jacar Press. He recently retired from public-school librarianship and lives in Urbana, Illinois with his partner. They have two grown sons. His website is at https://www.matthewmurrey.net/ and he can be found on Twitter @mytwords.
Dream Where We Rearrange a Bedroom for Dying
Before the beds can be moved, they must be dismantled.
Not the Ikea kind. We hunt for tools
in the empty garage. My brother finds a Phillips-head screwdriver
in the medicine cabinet to take the beds apart.
I am a moving woman and observer here in my parents’ bedroom.
I push my wooden crib, where I bounced as a baby,
into a corner flush against one wall. My mother needs it there to crawl
under and cry. An ambulance in the driveway, engine running,
holds my father while we move furniture in and out. This is neither home
nor hospital; a liminal space in which a bed with side rails appears
with my father in it. A commode floats into place; a urinal balances
on the seat. The nightstand, the only real furniture that belongs
in the bedroom, sits where it is supposed to sit. On it, a rosary and jar
of Vicks VapoRub flank a table lamp, the only light in the room.
The lamp is supposed to be here too. A porcelain Provençal statue
stands on the lamp base–a farmer, with a goose in a basket
hangs on his right arm, its beak chipped off long ago. He stares
into the distance, for signs of a coming storm. A purple umbrella
is tucked under his left arm.
Amy Haddad is a poet, nurse and educator who taught in the health sciences at Creighton University where she is now a Professor Emerita. Her poetry and short stories have been published in the American Journal of Nursing, Janus Head, Journal of Medical Humanities, Touch, Bellevue Literary Review, Pulse, Persimmon Tree, Annals of Internal Medicine, Aji Magazine, DASH, Oberon Poetry Magazine and the anthologies Between the Heart Beats and Intensive Care: More Poetry and Prose by Nurses, University of Iowa Press, Iowa City, Iowa and Stories of Illness and Healing: Women Write Their Bodies, Kent State University Press, Kent, Ohio. She is the 2019 recipient of the Annals of Internal Medicine poetry prize for “Families Like This” for the best poem published in the journal. She won 3rd place for the 2019 Kalanithi Writing Awards from Stanford University for her poem “Dark Rides.” Her first chapbook The Geography of Kitchens was published by Finishing Line Press in August, 2021. Her first poetry collection An Otherwise Healthy Woman was published by Backwaters Press, an imprint of the University of Nebraska Press in March, 2022.
use my arms
to hold back
the wind
to open all
your doors
to carry
the umbrella
to bring you
breakfast
to carry your
coat
to bring in the
birthday cake
to hold your
favorite books
to collect the
shells we love
to dance
for no reason
to carry the
flowers you grow
Dr. Roger Singer maintained a private practice in upstate New York, for 38 years until retiring in 2014. He has served on multiple committees and lectured at colleges in the United States, Canada, and Australia, and has authored over fifty articles for his profession and served as a medical technician during the Vietnam era. Dr. Singer has had over 1,500 poems published on the internet, magazines, and in books and is a Pushcart Award Nominee. Some of the magazines that have accepted his poems for publication are: Westward Quarterly, Jerry Jazz, SP Quill, Avocet, Underground Voices, Outlaw Poetry, Literary Fever, Dance of my Hands, Language & Culture, The Stray Branch, Tipton Poetry Indigo Rising, Down in the Dirt, Fullosia Press, Orbis, Penwood Review, Subtle Tea, Ambassador Poetry Award, Massachusetts State Poetry Society, Louisiana State Poetry Society Award, Readers Award Orbis Magazine 2019, Arizona State Poetry Award 2020, and Mad Swirl Anthology 2018, 2019.
Mad Song
O bird whose breast’s the sky, is your red
eye
benign or not? I lodged in its whiffle feathers
of cloud, hoping they were compassion because
they were soft,
because their structure, keratin off of one stalk
had something in its symmetry I remembered
its one-after-another familiarity, like the peace
of counting
or braiding hair. Always I wonder who is listening
to me
in this state where I may be surprised
a little confused and girlish, liking the round-lipped
mugs in the cafeteria
because they were stolid. Holding one of them
could hold me to the table,
the table in turn could hold me to the floor, floor
to the room. Into what beaded network
would I have vanished
were they not holding me there? It is
terrible to admit it,
when she takes the dove’s mask off,
and you see the face, unbraided.
Monica Raymond writes poems, plays, librettos, lyrics and sometimes prose from an old house in Cambridge, Massachusetts. A MacDowell Colony Fellow, Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellow, Swan Fellow (Vermont Studio Center), and Playwrights’ Center Jerome Fellow, Raymond has taught writing and interdisciplinary arts at Harvard, CUNY, and the Boston Museum School.
Tromboncinos
In July, we dangle from trellises,
hide under vines that spread like kudzu,
grow near kin─Patty Pan, Acorn, Butternut─
in between summer yellow and striped zucchini.
Fellow cucurbits disown us, envy
our rounded bottoms and voluptuous curves.
At farmers’ markets and vendors’ stalls,
our sculpted forms appear more artistry
than nourishment. Children beg
to hold us, pretend to play trombone.
In our salad days, we wax pale green,
taste as tender as Crooknecks or Delicatos.
Left on the stem, we toughen and tan.
Come fall, our shapely flesh is spooned
into soups and casseroles, save a few
beauties who lounge on hay bales.
Karen Luke Jackson, author of If You Choose To Come, GRIT, and The View Ever Changing and co-editor of The Story Mandala: Finding Wholeness in a Divided World, draws upon contemplative practices, nature, family stories, and clowning for inspiration. Her work has appeared in numerous journals, including Ruminate, The Atlanta Review, One, Broad River Review, and Channel Magazine. Karen resides in a cottage on a goat pasture in Flat Rock, North Carolina. To learn more visit www.karenlukejackson.com
All that can be done
In the camps
in the desert
there was nothing.
They’d been stolen,
dispossessed, stored here
behind barbwire. They were
without.
All they had were stones
and so they collected
stones, dug them
from the hard dry ground
and lovingly polished them
as best they could,
carved perhaps
with what knives they were allowed,
to make the stones
beautiful, more beautiful,
reflecting all they had left:
which was memory.
The stones became the real world
and the real, hard, world
a transient illusion.
*
This meandering azure
stream sparkles in sunlight.
Its bed is blistering
concrete, nature constructed
around it in barked beds,
placed stones and yucca.
The air dry and toasting, the stream
is made of glass, crushed,
blue, bluer
than any stream or sky.
It takes the place
in this park
of succour, of coolth
and sweetness to the eye.
It is all that can be done
and it is enough for us.
We remember a stream.
*
We come back
to our communities,
houses called homes, facilities,
named for what no longer is:
Whispering Pines, Antelope Valley,
Fox Hollow. Someone has set them
like glittering stones
for us, the real world
looking-glassed by nomenclature
so we can feel we are
part of the plan, part
of the world,
to be remembered.
*
My wife’s father jots notes
on yellow legal pads
scattered around his room,
itemizing what he thinks he has —
houses, boats, dogs,
wives. All are gone, but
they are what he can hold
in the unshaped monotony
of his new days
here at Fox Hollow.
He refines, massages,
reiterates the shards of memory,
the real world that was.
Although each house, each woman
merges with the others, an amalgam,
one he thinks exists and is his,
and has never been sold,
and has never died.
Sean Bentley has published three collections: GRACE & DESOLATION (Cune Press 1996), INSTANCES (Confluence Press 1979), and INTO THE BRIGHT OASIS (Jawbone Press 1976).
His poems have appeared recently in:
- Mudlark
- New World Writing.net
- Central Coast Poetry Show
- Azure
- The Literary Nest
- Gray Sparrow , and
- Sheila-Na-Gig,
as well as I-70, Chiron Review, The Cape Rock, Crab Creek Review, Seattle Review, Third Coast Magazine, Painted Bride Quarterly, Poetry Northwest, Northwest Review, Bellingham Review, Another Chicago Magazine, Coe Review, Switched-on Gutenberg and many other magazines.
His work has also appeared in the anthologies PAGE TO PAGE : RETROSPECTIVES OF WRITERS FROM THE SEATTLE REVIEW (Univ. of Washington Press), IRON COUNTRY (Copper Canyon), INTRO 6 (Doubleday), PONTOON 3 (Floating Bridge Press), ISLAND OF RIVERS (Pacific NW National Parks Assoc.), and DARKNESS AND LIGHT: PRIVATE WRITING AS ART (iUniverse).
From 1982 to 2002 he coedited the poetry magazine Fine Madness and its retrospective anthology, MARCH HARES (2002).
Movable Feast
I. Baltimore
Three steps down to the family
room and mom’s soap operas.
But of the kitchen itself,
I remember nothing.
II. Pittsburgh (I)
Beyond the door the small, square deck,
three steps down to the concrete patio
and the yard where schnauzers ran.
The dirt underneath perfect for army men,
digging for buried treasure,
kissing neighbors. The room itself
had a seven-inch black-and-white TV
on a shelf above the table. I was still
too young to cook, at least as far as my
parents were concerned, but I sat
and watched shows on that TV while
my mother cooked meatloaf, tomato
sauce, chicken and waffles.
III. Morgantown
With my parents absent, my brother
would turn up the radio and hop
around to the Rolling Stones
and yell “I love these badmouth songs!”
I was found singing Cliff Richard,
Blondie, maybe Otis Redding
while looking out the window at the hill,
its trees, a wall of kudzu. Even
with a brand-new Jenn-Air I was
relegated to putting things in the sink.
IV. State College
I remember nothing of this.
V. Pittsburgh (II)
Our house there is for sale;
those who owned it since
have remodeled. The photos
show the division between kitchen
and breakfast nook gone,
an island installed instead,
blue carpeting. It was green,
I think, in the eighties. My mother’s
small radio always tuned
to talk shows on KDKA, my brother
crashing toy cars under the table.
Plants everywhere.
VI. Philadelphia
As my parents moved, their kitchens
got smaller; barely room for two of us
to cook. The plants and radio relegated
to the breakfast nook, its black cardboard
birds taped to the window.
VII. Lehighton
The kitchen is a place to microwave
frozen dinners, keep the dog
for paper training. The stove
is clean, as if unused, the dishes
in their dark-paneled cabinets
released only for company.
VIII. Portland
I have never seen this.
Robert Beveridge (he/him) makes noise (xterminal.bandcamp.com) and writes poetry in Akron, OH. Recent/upcoming appearances in Schuylkill Valley Journal, Contemporary Verse 2, and Ouch! Collective, among others.
The Sons of Pearl Divers
It is absurd to see an enchanted princess in every girl
who walks by. What do you think you are a troubadour?
Roberto Bolaño
It may be absurd to think you are a pearl diver
just because your father was and made a living
finding poems inside abandoned shells,
absurd to think that metaphors would fill
your lungs until they exhale a song he might hear
from the bottom of the ocean.
As if an old and lonely troubadour would sing
a song that breaks the spell of sorrow
when the house is as quiet as the day
your children leave to find their breath
away from your lungs and your advice,
as they long to reach the hand of the stranger
who travels in their chests, the one who has
not yet befriended them but introduced himself,
Greetings! I am you.
Their longing has not found its name, uneasy
in the presence of the sea, their voices struggle
through the threshold of their lips,
even a stranger recognizes what is familiar,
how far you will have to swim to find your pearl.
how deep you’ll need to dive to meet your father.
Juan Pablo Mobili was born in Buenos Aires, and adopted by New York. His poems appeared in The American Journal of Poetry, Hanging Loose Press, and The Paterson Literary Review, among others, as well as many publications in Europe, Asia, Latin America, and Australia. He received multiple nominations for the Pushcart Prize, and his chapbook, “Contraband,” was published in 2022. He’s also a Guest Editor for The Banyan Review.
Grateful for Cloud Cover
It is utterly still,
the cool slipped in
under the morning air.
A piece of sandstone
wedged into the hillside
turns its head
becomes
a cat.
In the Japanese garden
smooth raked stones
are combed into soothing circles
around one boulder
one low bare cherry.
Last night my four-year old
called, come to the window,
you can hear the peepers,
and the night was full
of the peepers’ song,
the smell of damp earth,
the enormous rising moon.
By the old abandoned house
up on the hill
we found a large rock
just the right shape
and size and heft.
We brought it home
to anchor our front garden.
Madeleine Cohen Oakley is a retired librarian living in upstate New York. She loves words, language, and grammar, and especially loves mentoring children to write poems.
The Year of a Dozen Bones
A visit in a dream.
Your book is called Sky and Sea.
I’m sure this is not a title you would choose.
In the soup of the year,
miso, carrots and onions, sweet potatoes and greens.
Twelve prophetic bones.
I am a guest at two dystopian weddings.
The bride and groom in masks,
the guests in tiny squares
on a computer.
In dreams, I visit everyone I have loved –
and you with your book of poems
in an old building. On the stairs
you take off my wedding ring,
claiming it’s your turn now,
that you are finally ready.
From the pages of your book,
a thousand monarch butterflies
fly into the sky.
Underwater,
the waves begin to sing.
Everyone takes off their masks
as the future is revealed.
In the sky, the moon continues its circles,
shining reflected light –
a dragon kite lit from inside,
the page of the future being written
in invisible ink.
Diane Frank is the author of eight books of poems, three novels, and a photo memoir of her 400-mile trek in the Nepal Himalayas. While Listening to the Enigma Variations: New and Selected Poems (Glass Lyre Press) is Winner of the 2022 Next Generation Indie Book Award for Poetry. Diane lives in San Francisco, where she dances, plays cello in the Golden Gate Symphony, and creates her life as an art form.
Departure
I see the small cave the man at Gate 44 has made―
forward in his seat, elbows to knees, scowl directed at his phone.
Nothing touches him.
It’s not even a cave, really. A crevice in limestone.
A sliver of shelter beside a boulder.
Barely refuge enough to fend off the evangelizing neighbor,
the missing flight crew, the terrorist with a fuse
in his shoe. He makes do with what he has.
In Mesa Verde, under the cliff edge, ochre walls glow
in early sun―the day’s first stone-on-stone of corn
being ground, foot drums pounding in the Kiva.
A ceremony of order.
If you ask today why the ancestors left home,
the answer is always: It was time to go.
The day my father’s heart gave out, I wasn’t ready.
A plane rises at the angle of aggression.
Smaller, smaller, into clouds.
Owen Lake, Seven AM
Today the dead are making a display of absence.
Along the bank, their broken limbs rise from water:
bony fingers, empty of yesterday’s gleaming turtles.
Distant shrugging mountains, watercolor layers—
the nearest indigo, sharp-edged, the farther ones receding
into fog. Metal benches clammy with dew—they ponder
the reunion of loved ones. And the red-headed duck,
one derelict feather askew at the crown of its head,
a quiver traveling up its neck, the open beak, her glare—
Kathy Nelson, 2019 recipient of the James Dickey Prize and MFA graduate of the Warren Wilson Program for Writers, is the author of The Ledger of Mistakes (Terrapin Books). Her work appears or is forthcoming in About Place, LEON Literary Review,New Ohio Review, The Cortland Review, Tar River Poetry, Stirring Literary Journal, Valparaiso Poetry Review, and elsewhere.
Cold Moon
Corn stumps faded to wheat-brown
sentinels in windblown snow
their neat rows the last reminder
of dusky evenings
when the cornfields buzzed with energy
and no one, not even the fox, could find a way through the lushness
of leaves so densely planted
when the pale wafer moon appeared
in a fading pink sky
and twilight smelled of earth
and life.
Now desire has frozen
into winter’s darkness
the moon but a silver thread
in an immense cold night
but your voice remains in memory
still asking if it is planting time
again.
Christine Hague has written for The Concord [NH] Monitor as well as columns in three weekly newspapers. She has had stories and poems published in The Aurorean, Thema, Around Concord, Earth’s Daughters, The Henniker Review and other magazines. She and her husband live in New Hampshire.
There is too much afternoon some days.
On a day with too much afternoon,
a woman walks its length in the area of a room.
There is a vase of colorful flowers on a small, round table.
The woman wants to paint them.
She wants to paint them so she can own
their colors. She has no paint.
On this day with too much afternoon,
she thinks of her children
as she walks within
the walls of her small room.
Is she happy? Happy thinking of her children
who are far away? Yes, she is happy.
Is she unhappy they are so far away?
Yes, she is unhappy. She is both
whether the afternoon is long or short.
She feels her children
as though they are the colors of the flowers.
She feels them, but she does not own them.
Karen Neuberg is the author of the full-length poetry collection, PURSUIT (Kelsay Press) and the chapbook the elephants are asking (Glass Lyre).. Recent poems can be found in Big City Lit, Nixes Mate, and MAINTENANT 17. She is the associate editor of the online journal First Literary Review-East and lives in Brooklyn, NY