Coastal Prayer
In the pre-dawn glow, the pelican aunties
look down on me from their pier posts in sleepy disapproval,
their eyes set in Dia de los Muertos faces
as I paddleboard the calm intracoastal
before the boats wake.
No, not me, out to sea, among the crashing waves,
yet still in waters beyond my depth on tremulous footing
where little fishes leap like dashes on a slope field,
the beauty of their tiny splashes mar the surface and make light
a terror flight from a predatory snapper.
Give me a rule to follow:
The constant rule through all these changes,
The power rule to not give in,
Devise some rule so I make a difference.
Britt Kaufmann lives in the Appalachian Mountains where she writes and works as a math tutor. Her work has appeared in Scientific American, Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel, Kakalak, and Soft Star Magazine among others. Her first full-length collection Midlife Calculus will be published by Press 53 in September 2024. brittkaufmann.com
Agricultural Advancements
Barely visible fifteen feet up, a thin morning fog floats
like a question above the 17-acre sweet potato field,
September’s purple-leafed vines curling, tangled
between raised rows. Pigweed reaches like church steeples
toward that dissipating mist, dozens of spiky seed pods
on every plant. Herbicides have immunized pigweed
against themselves. We must uproot it by hand and carry it
out of the field by the armload because if one root tendril
remains, it will take hold, tenacious as a terrible memory,
or a memory of when farming was not as advanced as it is today.
Eric Weil, a retired English prof, lives in Raleigh, NC. His poems have appeared in journals ranging from American Scholar to Poetry, from Main Street Rag to Red Planet, and from Dead Mule to Sow’s Ear. He has three chapbooks in print and loves to trade with other poets: eaweil8521@gmail.com. Growing up, he was a redhead but not a stepchild.
On a Wooded Trail
When you walk this shaded path
hold your head up,
but do not let the light
dazzle you back
into blindness.
Consider the answer
as well as the asking
of the question.
The canopy is fed
by the dirt beneath your feet:
love both.
Know that as you spread
the limbs of your desire
toward a wise and waiting sky,
what cannot die
is hope.
Susan Blair is a poet, writer and arts event organizer in Wenatchee, WA. Her full-length poetry collection, A Howling, was published this past fall by Press 53 in Winston-Salem, NC. Her chapbook, What Remains of a Life, was published in 2018 by Finishing Line Press. Susan also writes poems for children and presents them costumed as “Perri the Poetry Fairy.” Her five poetry-activity books for kids are available at perrithepoetryfairy.com. Susan graduated from Middlebury College in Vermont with a B.A. in German & Russian.
How He Colors
This is how he draws his fears:
six bombers dropping napalm
on the thatch roof of his home.
His family is not there.
They are above all of that.
Mother high in a huey;
his father is a rocket;
our artist flies a black jet.
From the sun’s blob of angles,
his pets rise up like angels,
that brown cat, a flying frog,
the last, his favorite, Dog.
So Queen Dog won’t soar alone,
he draws skulls to act as drones.
Paul Jones is not much of a person of interest. A manuscript of his poems crashed into the moon’s surface in 2019 carried by Israel’s Beresheet Lander. In 2021, Jones was inducted into the NC State Computer Science Hall of Fame. His book, Something Wonderful, was published by Redhawk Press in 2021. Recently, Jones has published poems in Hudson Review, Tar River Poetry, NC Literary Review, as well as in anthologies including Best American Erotic Poems (1800-Present). Paul Jones’ next book, “Something Necessary,” will be published by Redhawk Publications this fall.
kitchen
my kitchen drawers
still have particles
of the spices
spilled after our last fight
i tell people
it is a way to repel insects
i do not tell them
it feels like the last
grain of ashes that
i am not ready to let go of
i tell them
it adds to the beauty
i do not say
it is all i sniff
when every cell
in my body
is breaking down
to be with you
Himanshi is a designer based in the Himalayan foothills of India. Writing these pieces is part of her healing journey. As a designer, her muse has always been nature and human emotions. How they work, and how they help the past, present, and future converge.
New Music
Ancient trope, not what we mean when we
speak of twelve-tone tunelesness, or Cage’s
clever three minutes. It evokes music’s
awesome power, which we sometimes degrade
into mere emotive force: Nietzsche did
that, spawned a cliché that now elicits
questions begged by bad argument, Poet, be
seated at the piano. Play the hoo . . .
Not for this did Boethius die, not
for this did Pythagoras dream up new
bodies. Rather to raise some stones in Wales
and move them to Salisbury plain. Rather
to un-thing the incarnate, transport it home,
if home be a mile or a thousand years away.
Julian O. Long has published poems, essays, and reviews widely since his first published poetry appeared in The Sewanee Review over fifty years ago. Recent credits include Better than Starbucks and Extinction Rebellion Creative Hub. His chapbook, High Wire Man, is number twenty-two in the University of North Texas Trilobite Poetry series. At eighty-six he counts surviving three strokes among his life’s accomplishments, is twice retired and lives with his wife, Kathleen Farrell, in a Saint Louis brick house where he tries to stay healthy and avoid mischief. Follow him at julianlong.net.
Connaught
The way you say Connaught sounds
like how a neighbor’s dog used
to bark at us whenever
we stepped out our own backdoor.
As if it knew. As if I
knew it, too. How perspectives
shift this side of the Atlantic
and those few things you carried
become cherished beyond all
reason. The linen, the lace,
all traces of lavender
and heather. All that misty,
moisty weather. Our own sense
of barren, no escaping
that landscape. No escaping
the lyrical longing in your
voice. As if I had that choice.
Deborah H. Doolittle has lived in lots of different places (including the United Kingdom and Japan), but now calls North Carolina home. An AWP Intro Award winner and Pushcart Prize nominee, she is the author of Floribunda and three chapbooks, No Crazy Notions, That Echo, and Bogbound. When not writing or reading or editing BRILLIG: a micro lit mag, she is training for running road races, or practicing yoga, while sharing a house with her husband, six housecats, and a backyard full of birds.
Ice-Skater
I see you, trembling on sharp blades
over a surface of unsettling, brilliant white.
You don’t even know how to put the shoes on right.
Rubber slippers were enough
for where you came from.
Growing up walking beside salt-sweet surf
under coconut trees
and smelling bougainvillea and jasmine
in your mother’s garden.
Thinking about dinner.
You’ll have all your favorite things, at home.
Your mother knows what they are.
Along the way you would buy a coffee
foaming cream, and hot,
from a tin-roofed shack lighted only by a kerosene lamp,
while mosquitoes feed on the salt sweet sweat
around your ankles and you nibble on a jellabi
as rich oil oozes onto your fingers.
Now, you have cold ankles,
in a cold country, and you’re trying to skate.
But, what if the ice breaks?
Shymala Dason is a first-generation immigrant from Malaysia and of South Asian descent. Her poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction have appeared in The Massachusetts Review, The Margins, Hyphen, the Asian American Writers Workshop (AAWW) post-9/11 anthology Topography of War, Duende, The Literary Review, Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Fantasy Magazine, The Gateway Review, et al. She was a finalist for the Flannery O’Connor short fiction collection award and the AAWW & Hyphen short fiction award.
Hair and Nails
The worst days, the gray milestones ranged
back to first memory, the outsized mail impossible
to square neatly to the edges of a lifetime stack,
were angrily inscribed, kept, cherished almost,
so you never could let go.
Such as: a night you were impertinent at table.
Your thick-set father whipped an open hand across
and broke your nose. And being struck was little worse
than being sent away in times of household poverty
to a remote and dreary farm.
A baffled rage persisted, private as your breath.
To hate this man and not yourself was past your reach,
when your eyes were his brown eyes, your hands
his long and ruddy hands, his curling chestnut hair
the pattern of your own.
Your fingers, boyish, slim, were so much like your son’s.
That is: like mine – nails bitten, never tended,
dry knuckles always chapped and scabbed,
but not cut up and rough like mine from play;
instead, from work and furious neglect.
I saw blame lengthened, mother, with your hair,
and that your testy brushing of my curls
could not unwind the kinks you wanted gone.
I knew that in your sore and slender hands
a reckoning was held.
And still the nails grew from the tender quick,
the hair in ringlets from the fragile scalp,
to manifest what renders love equivocal,
recurring always, fixed in pain and grieving,
unforgotten, not to be forgiven.
Jack Romig was a longtime manuscript editor with Book-of-the-Month Club in New York City and poetry editor of the online magazine Common Sense II. His poems have appeared in diverse literary journals. He lives in the eastern Pennsylvania village of Huff’s Church.
Mother’s Earth
my hands are as soft as my mother’s were
but they don’t hold her scars
scratched by barbs of the cotton bolls she twisted
and pulled at in the farm fields under a dead
Delano sun at day’s end she earned 87 cents
bought a hot dog from a vendor parked across the road
where she sat eating it in the dirt
the lifeline on my mother’s palm was as long
as the row after row of grapes she picked and packed
stacked and trayed these fruits for clean bright tables
far from the dust of the camp she sat and slept in
the land she worked and lived in
field she gave her back to
brown soil on my mother’s hands
this dirt of mother’s earth
Susana Gonzales is a southern California poet whose writings explore her Mexican American roots and the lesbian feminist experience. She has been published in various literary anthologies and journals including The Power of the Feminine I, Sheila Na Gig, Gyroscope Review, One Art, The Santa Fe Literary Review, Mobius, and As You Were: The Military Review.
Almost
Cotton-soft light
sifting through window shades
says autumn
while the clatter of rain
on still-plump leaves says
almost
but not yet
the same way
the slant of your back yearning
toward the edge
of the mattress says
not yet
gone
but almost.
Peg Robarchek’s memoir, Welcome to the Church of I Don’t Have a Clue: My irreverent, post-evangelical, sacred life, was published in November 2023. Her poetry has been featured in Naugatuck River Review, Blast Furnace, Kentucky Review, the Poetry in Plain Sight initiative from the North Carolina Poetry Society, Rust+Moth, Prime Number Magazine, Red Earth Review, and others. Her poetry collection, Inventing Sex, was published by Main Street Rag. She lives in North Carolina and is a former journalist.
Attention Elsewhere
What have we overlooked – Lyn Hejinian, Happily
What else have I made invisible to myself?
Have many other houses burned out on this street?
I fed my wandering attention sideways, ignored or
overlooked this charred family ruin right at the crosswalk.
What was more present to my body than this curb-edge?
Have many other people met this gutter with their faces?
I guess the toy store window was more beckoning,
over and above the gap my foot saluted. Now
look at these several worried people overhead.
What did we think our mother thought of teasing?
Had we considered curbing the hilarity
we had with punning on her dinner-table talk?
Overlooked or ignored the hurt, that’s what
we sons did, trussed up in our word games.
Had enough been thoroughly enough long before
what she said to us cut us in our chairs?
David P. Miller’s collection, Bend in the Stair, was published by Lily Poetry Review Books in 2021. Sprawled Asleep was published by Nixes Mate Books in 2019. His poems have received Best of the Net and Pushcart nominations, and have appeared in Meat for Tea, Lily Poetry Review, LEON Literary Review, Solstice, Salamander, Cream Scene Carnival, Kestrel, Riddled with Arrows, Nixes Mate Review, and Jerry Jazz Musician, among other journals. His poems “Interview” and “And You” were included in an issue of Magma (UK) focused on teaching poetry to secondary school students. He lives in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, with his wife, the visual artist Jane Wiley.
Lichtenberg Delta
Imagine roots like
lightning
arcing through the wrack
electric instant
splitting
soil, white and feathered into
twilight. Roots like
afterimage
lightning burned, and burning struck
into skin, history
story
took you by the hand, the same one
lightning’s shadow
splashed.
so the proliferating branches, so dark matter.
Anti-weight. Massier
than memory.
Hannah Ringler is a poet, gardener, and mom in Durham, NC, and spends the time not in the garden or with her son wrangling the North Carolina Poetry Society Poetry in Plain Sight program.
The Point of a Dagger
The meanest mistake has a point to make.
Marie Ponsot
My father lamented that regret
would be the dagger between his ribs
and remorse would haunt our country,
witnessing the reluctance of our fellow citizens
to cry out against the injustices committed
on the poorest of our neighbours.
As mean as a mistake can be,
my father knew its hurt did not equal
the wounds inflicted consciously,
sharper than a dagger’s thrust,
but his sadness did not stop bleeding.
The doctor told my mother it was too late,
that her husband would not heal
from such a deep wound.
Juan Pablo Mobili was born in Buenos Aires, and adopted by New York. His poems appeared in Tupelo Quarterly, The American Journal of Poetry, Hanging Loose Press, South Florida Poetry Journal, Louisville Review, and The Worcester Review, , among others, as well as international publications such as Impspired (UK), Hong Kong Review (Hong Kong, SAR), and The Wild Word (Germany). His work received several nominations for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, and his chapbook, “Contraband,” was published in 2022. He’s also a Guest Editor for The Banyan Review.