Sic Gloria Transit Mundi by Conor Walton

Contents

David Kirby | DeWitt Clinton | Jessamine O’Connor | Tyler Raso | Jenna Rindo | Rebecca Starks | Lena Khalaf Tuffaha | Jacqueline Kolosov | Julie L. Moore | Mike White | Iyanuoluwa Adenle | Anna Weaver | Robert Fillman | Anne Pitkin | Katherine Soniat | Robin Turner | Ken Craft | Terry Blackhawk | Kathleen A. Wakefield | Margo Berdeshevsky | Bonnie Naradzay

Second Look — Quarantine

Walt Whitman is Dying

You say, Can you sit with me a little longer?

and I say,

Yes, I can, Walt Whitman, and your mind travels back

to the 1850s,

to Pfaff’s restaurant on Bleecker and Broadway,

where actors, artists, comedians, poets, and novelists

shout at one another,

tell jokes, spill as much beer as they drink, and fill the air

with cigar smoke,

where you and your friends cling to the innocence

of simpler times

as the rustic world disappears, factories spring up everywhere,

workers become specialists.

Give me now libidinous joys only! you say.

Give me the drench of my passions, give me life coarse and rank.

The newspaper says the doctors think you might not have more

than three or four days

but that you replied, We may beat them all yet.

In 1852, the characters in Hawthorne’s Blithedale Romance

live communally,

enjoying poetry readings, concerts, and tableaux vivants

along with their daily work.

You laugh and say, O you shunned person, I do not shun you.

I come forth in your midst, I will be your poet,

I will be more to you than the rest.

In 1888, the work in Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward

is done by machines,

and the citizens of Bellamy’s utopia don’t have to go

all the way down

to some band shell in a park to hear a concert.

Instead, live music is piped into their apartments

so they can enjoy it alone.

❧

The newspaper says you are so weak that it’s doubtful

you will live until morning.

The old weird America you remember is a country

of street preachers, con men,

hobos, frontiersmen, wandering musicians, slaves on the run,

Native American shamans

and shape-shifters, folk heroes and villains.

They say Johnny Appleseed sowed seeds randomly,

but in fact

he planted nurseries, built fences around them

to protect them from livestock,

left them in the care of a neighbor who sold trees on shares,

and returned every year or two to see how things were going.

Johnny Appleseed was against grafting, though, so his apples

weren’t fit to eat

and could only be used for cider.

Johnny Appleseed was our American Dionysus.

In those days, you say, our American Kronos

might have been

Samuel Mason, who robbed and killed passengers

on the Natchez Trace

and was said to have eaten them.

Kronos ate his own children, I remind you, which is worse

than eating strangers.

You’re right, you say, but still.

You say you get a sense of the old weird America

on board Melville’s Pequod,

when Ishmael and pagan Queequeq, who have

spent the night

cuddling happily in a boarding-house bed, join

a polyglot crew

to serve maimed Ahab in his vindictive quest,

and you sense it as well in The Confidence-Man

as the paddle boat halts in its watery path

to let on one group

of eccentrics as another disembarks,

with barely a person among them whom he or she

seems to be.

And don’t forget the Zouaves, I say, who fought on both sides

of the Civil War (seventy Yankee companies, twenty-five

for the Rebs)

in faux-Algerian pantaloons, fezzes, and embroidered waistcoats.

You always loved a man in uniform.

You say the Zouaves cut quite a figure on the parade ground,

though in the name of efficiency, these days soldiers

all dress alike—

they can kill better that way.

❧

The newspaper says Walt Whitman continues

to improve!

He is gaining strength every day!

He sat up in bed again today!

The newspaper says you had tired of milk punch

and have only eaten

two oysters in the last thirty-six hours,

one yesterday morning and the other this afternoon.

You say poetry always fails, that to work, it has to.

Joy consists of union, you say, poetry of the search for union.

Wrenched and sweaty, cool and calm then my body becomes.

I do not know it—it is without name—it is a word unsaid.

Perhaps I might tell more.

I ask you if you feel any pain, and you say no,

but I can hardly hear you.

❧

Walt, the war killed your dream of a world

founded on

the blissful love of comrades and replaced it

with the horror of brother killing brother.

When you learn that your brother George

has been wounded

at the battle of Fredericksburg, you rush to find him.

George’s injury is slight, but when you see

the sufferings of others,

you become a great mothering sort of man

who visits the hospitals

in and around Washington for the next three years,

bringing ice cream,

tobacco, brandy, books, magazines, pens and paper.

You write letters for those who cannot.

More than a few die in your arms.

You look like Santa Claus with your long white beard,

wine-colored suit,

and bulging bag of presents. Small wonder that,

each time you leave,

many of the wounded soldiers, some of them still

in their teens, call out, Walt, Walt, come again!

Ah! You look over your shoulder at them and think,

If you want me again, look for me under

your boot-soles,

and even then, you won’t find me.

You sleep—you sleep long.

Still, you can’t help yourself. Can you sit with me

a little longer? you say.

And I say, Yes, I can, Walt Whitman. Yes, I can,

yes.

David Kirby‘s collection The House on Boulevard St.: New and Selected Poems was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2007. Kirby is the author of Little Richard: The Birth of Rock ‘n’ Roll, which the Times Literary Supplement of London called “a hymn of praise to the emancipatory power of nonsense.” His latest poetry collection is More Than This. He teaches English at Florida State University.

What Do You Think the Stars Are For?

We are all candles, aren’t we, flickering away

Our lives so much we hardly have time to just

Pause, yet we do, even if some illuminate more

Of caved ceilings in the Pyrenees while some

Of us just look up from the fields of grain planted

Before we knew their names. Now we wander

In and out of houses, some plastered, some wood,

Some with the new iron of our age, some going

To the bathroom, some finding someone to spend

The night with, some planning away the future

As if it was there. But always we return to what

We think we’ll be, or who we might have been,

Even Uncle Raphael’s new painting in the Uffizi

Gives us all a moment to hold our breath. Still we

Do this, watching our lives flicker, wondering if we

Get to do this tomorrow. A few of us, including

Gertrude, don’t want to go on this path, rather we’ll

Just saunter down to the white sand beach, and ask,

How long can we stay, did you bring a book? Some

Of us will make others lunch, and some, so rude, will

Not even think about the service we’ve given, even

If it turns out the Greek salad needed a few more

Olives, a few more chunks of that sweet, white cubed

Milk we love to call feta. For some this is pretty much

It, as we are not ever going to get to go behind what

So many of us think is out there, beyond the stars.

Perhaps we can invent something that will make us

Wake up, even though the forecast is for more snow.

DeWitt Clinton is the author of three books of poetry: The Conquistador Dog Texts and The Coyot. Inca Texts (New Rivers Press), At the End of the War (Kelsay Books, 2018), and a fourth collection is in production: On a Lake by a Moon: Fishing with the Chinese Masters, (Is A Rose Press).

Sky Burial on a Peckham High-Rise

The only flight we will ever take

together, the three of us

and the first thing you do on arrival

is leave,

you leave us for hours

with strangers

and when you land back

get straight at it, gouge out

on the couch and only come round eventually

to my fury –

this was meant to be a holiday, and besides

you didn’t even keep me any.

In a few days it’s forgotten

when vaguely in my peripheral vision

suddenly the lump of your body

as it’s dragged out to the landing.

They explain slowly, how you can’t call an ambulance

here, because the police follow,

that they always leave the OD’s outside

at someone else’s door.

Propped four floors up at a grey brick wall

in the lilac twilight with blueing lips, not breathing,

you look so peaceful

I start screaming.

There’s a dark satisfaction in slapping

your flaccid face, like returning an unwanted gift.

Hitting harder, I hear myself beg

wake up wake up wake up

but you won’t.

Lights swing and swoop across the car-park

far below, wink blue and orange and I’m wrenched off you,

pulled inside, the door held shut, and hushed. We listen.

You are left out, exposed

to the sky, crows and paramedics.

Through the hours that follow

hearing nothing, you are both dead and alive.

Not knowing which, you can be either

at the same time. Our child sleeps –

simultaneously in a state of having a father,

and not.

Jessamine O’Connor moved to a train station on the Sligo Roscommon border twenty-one years ago. Currently studying Writing & Literature at Sligo IT, she facilitates the Hermit Collective, recently made her first poem-film, and is obsessed during the lock-in with making postcards, watching Countdown and playing Bananagram. With five chapbooks and some poetry prizes, her first collection Silver Spoon is published by Salmon Poetry this Autumn.

Loneliness Lullaby, or My First Grade Teacher Tells My Grandmother She’s Worried About My Social Anxiety

And a broken pink breath is the first word of every sentence

And I am swallowed by the carpet like a nutshell

And there is something heavy in my hands

And I am inside it is recess and my grandmother

gets a phone call like a shiver And it is every day in my heart

And the teacher says He is just so lonely And she says Lonely

like a proper noun like turning inside-out like something

heavy And that phone call is an unwound clock And

that phone call is a window open like dropping something

fragile and that phone call is somebody else’s daydream

And I do not remember if anyone cried that day

And I am holding hands with the carpet like closing your eyes

but not for sleep And I am seven years old because the sky is tall

and shrinking because there is something heavy in my hands

telling a story about a boy and a growing balloon And the boy

holds the balloon like something fragile And the boy loses the balloon

like the moon And I am rooted in the carpet like the tender string

that holds the sky And the teacher tells my grandmother His loneliness is

asymmetry And I am not in that phone call because there is something

heavy in my hands like a railroad And she is still

naming my loneliness And she says it is crumbs And she says

it is being left behind And she says it is a metaphor for something

fragile And I do not remember if anyone cried that day

because nobody had to because there was nobody to cry for

because I had something heavy in my hands with a sky and a sun

like dimples And there was something heavy in my hands

in the shape of a brighter and brighter lonely And there was something

heavy in my hands telling the story of a balloon that became the sun

And somewhere there is a train whistle which means two people will never

see each other again And somewhere they become symmetrical

with rain And they remember who cried that day because they had somebody

to cry for And somewhere loneliness is a sleepy animal with a reflection

in the timid water And that animal sees the tall sky

behind him like a story And that animal doesn’t remember

the timid water because the loneliness of the sun made

the lonely sky warm And that animal does not know if it is beautiful

to be cried for And that animal does not know if it is beautiful

to be remembered And that animal was warm like everything between

the sun and the soft hold of the lonely earth And every perfect

night that animal swells into sleep like something fragile

Tyler Raso is a poet currently based in Chicago, where he teaches elementary school cooking classes. His work has previously been featured in The London Magazine, burntdistrict, and elsewhere. In August, he’ll begin his MFA at Indiana University-Bloomington.

First Run after Cougar Sighting

"DNR believes at least two male cougars have been wandering Wisconsin since August, before that no confirmed sightings since the turn of the century."

— Ripon, WI Commonwealth Press, January 2018.

Each whisper of ditch-weed, each

passing shadow from leaves is the

movement under stillness before the cougar

leaps. He is packaged in power while

you’ve run yourself weak. You are scrawny

and anemic to his plush, tawny, sleek. You run

with some blessing of Boston, chase an

undeserved grace, the rhythmic sound

of your minimal shoes, laced over porous

fractured feet. He bounds through the Western

Hemisphere, scraping soil and snow

with secret codes. You repeat random

advice that’s been offered:

never turn your back,

look larger,

sound louder,

be filled with some primal, cellular power.

Resist the urge to run.

Since you carry no pack and wear no coat

let down your long hair.

Shake out your matted tangles then

stare into his amber eyes.

Chant his preferred prey in lieu of prayer–

mice, marmot, hare, fawn,

raccoon, yearling-bear.

Become zen but do not crouch down.

Lower your heart rate,

slow your breath and hope to flow under

before he pulls apart rows of slow-twitch

muscles you have nurtured for races with

recovery protein and water bottles, placed

in the crotch of tree branches. Know he will

bury your hundred pound carcass in the

exhausted sepia acre behind the farmer’s

fieldstone border. Your marathon training

will sustain him, give him strength

to find his screaming in-estrus mate.

Jenna Rindo lives with her husband on five acres in rural Wisconsin where they raised five children. Her poems have been published in Shenandoah, AJN, Natural Bridge, Tampa Review, and Verse Virtual. She has worked as a pediatric nurse and now teaches English to non-native speakers. She competes in 5K’s to full marathons and trains outside 12 months a year.

Mortal Taste

When she stopped eating I brought her inside,

and holding her in my lap read out loud

where Hazel leaves his body in Watership Down

until she stretched out, rasping in her throat,

and her littermate pushed at the towel

to bury her. I was aware of my mother

in tears and my father turning away.

Night after night I cried myself to sleep

until my father stopped me in the hallway,

or was it out on the broken brick walk?

the memory restores its surface tension

both ways—but then he often repeated himself—

to tell me I wasn’t crying about my rabbit

but about all the time I’d spent with it.

He taught me something I want to pass on:

if you want to stop crying, don’t think happy,

think evil—the way, when you taste something bitter,

salt is a better antidote than sweet is.

Now it is clearer to me: upstairs, his mother

was dying. Later that month he would wake us

and lead us to where she lay, her eyes part-pearl.

Each spring I’d move my rabbits from the garage

to an outdoor hutch where the wild reached them—

their ears and nose twitching, feet thumping alarm,

alert to a world I read poems over

that I couldn’t taste, like the wild clover.

The salt wheel rattled. When they shunned my hands

I stopped eating meat, their silence my conscience.

Now it is clearer to me: I conflated

my rabbit’s consciousness with my own

Cosmic No. No—truer to say some people

will always think of grief—think of it—

the way lawyers think of trust, economists

of generosity. Truer to say:

attuned to hers, in its wildness, mine had grown.

When I read of the migrant children warehoused

on the border, orphaned by law, secured by walls,

what am I crying for? I’ve spent so little time

thumping my foot on that cement floor, sick

of the same stale food, looking at no windows,

deciding how to use my one rough blanket.

And when I stop—what taste has worked its cure?

Rebecca Starks is the author of the poetry collections Time Is Always Now, a finalist for the 2019 Able Muse Book Award, and Fetch, Muse (forthcoming from Able Muse Press this fall), and is the recipient of Rattle’s 2018 Neil Postman Award for Metaphor. Her poems and short fiction have appeared in Valparaiso Review, Baltimore Review, Crab Orchard Review, Ocean State Review, Tahoma Literary Review, Slice, and elsewhere. She lives in Richmond, Vermont.

Dendrology

We are five in the van, three of us southerners or maybe two; one has migrated

west. Americans now, our shoes and proclivities indicate, practitioners

of liminal freedoms. We can identify and describe what will undo us.

We upend our stories with bilingual euphemisms. One recalls the curses

of a father. Another re-enacts his child’s slippage between words, mother

-tongue and moment. What kinds of trees are these I ask, noting lacy canopies

shading the sidewalks. It is engineered to look accessible, the American

city, the distance from one to another in this country. We know our names

are gray-zone enough to demand exercises of classification. They may

or may not be oak, though one of us doubts, lists the qualities of bark, of leaves.

Likely pecans, a southerner suggests, recalls a childhood neighbor’s tree.

Years ago, my mother confided as we drove north past a pleat of snowcapped cedars:

Some mornings I imagine it all returned, asphalt pulled up, all our structures

and transgressions undone. We are always learning the original names of trees.

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha is a poet, essayist, and translator. Her first full-length collection of poems, Water & Salt (Red Hen) won the 2018 Washington State Book Award for Poetry. She is also the author of two chapbooks, Arab in Newland (Two Sylvias, 2016), and Letters from the Interior (Diode Editions, 2019)

Apollo

On this first day of the new year

may I abide like the Afghan pines

some wise other planted here. Rooted

deep in red earth, and sky high,

theirs is a pride unlike the hawk’s yellow

eye, more kin to the jack rabbit’s

streamlined ear, a lean keenness,

this way of being urgently alive.

Mine is not the longing for flight, only

to be ferried on my good horse’s back,

his body nourished by grain, hay, and

juiciest apple. Before clearest morning

gave way to wind-blurred, wind-stirred sky,

I held the fruit to his whiskered mouth,

watched how greedily he gobbled sweetness

down. The new day, the new decade,

seemed to spool from his lips onto my hand.

What did Bishop say about rainbows—?

Oh well, too much sun here…Flecks of amber

flint the gelding’s brown eyes, this twelve-

hundred-pound teacher of laughter, patience,

but also of will, and sometimes fear—.

Apollo, my apple-sweet god of manure-and-

more-trot-than-canter who grunts through and

against hard work. Impossible to measure

such sweetness, except in the green height

of living pine when he and I are united

not as one flesh but as one force

catapulting out of the star-shard dark and

into the light.

Jacqueline Kolosov’s third collection of poems is Memory of Blue (Salmon, 2014). Her fourth, “Prevail,” is forthcoming from Salmon in 2021. Also a prose writer, she has published several YA/NA novels along with stories and essays. Jacqueline coedited 3 anthologies of contemporary prose and lives on acreage in West Texas with her animal tribe.

Canary

It’s like hearing the hum of the universe, she says,

mahogany shades of a Stradivarius

in one ear, piccolo and flute

chiaroscuro in the other,

permeating every waking moment

as she prophesies pain in the power lines.

She seeks the source in the faint

heartbeat of a rabbit, its percussion

fading into the earth beneath the shed;

in corn tassels outside her door,

their anthers whirring,

before the crescendo of the combine;

in the tires of vehicles

inking their lyrics on the road’s

slick vellum a mile away.

And everything throbs, even her scalp.

Do you hear that? she asks,

then describes the way the sirens’

flare amid impending rescue

accumulates notes on a treble clef—

a canary warbling like a carol

carrying glad tidings—then sinks,

settling into an ominous bass, a sign,

she fears, that her very breath may disappear.

Julie L. Moore is the author of four poetry collections, including, most recently, Full Worm Moon, which won a 2018 Woodrow Hall Top Shelf Award and received honorable mention for the Conference on Christianity and Literature’s 2018 Book of the Year.

Without Question I Am

The blind man

on the crowded night bus,

tap-tapping his way

toward a dark window

mirroring the lot of us,

refusing

with a brisk wave

of his hand my hand,

which he knows

without question I am

offering.

Mike White is the author of the collections How to Make a Bird with Two Hands (Word Works, 2012) and Addendum to a Miracle (Waywiser, 2017), winner of the Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize. His work has been published in magazines including Ploughshares, Poetry, The New Republic, The Threepenny Review, and The Yale Review.

Pulse

i found pleasure in counting with my fingers when you left. though i counted time in order of tens, i still poke at the memories. all this time, and i still wasn’t sure there was an end to anything. all this time, and i question the chances of our fingers locked together in this lifetime. though i pretended the miles stretched out between us was insignificant, i worried it grew wider while my back was turned. my bones, heavier from carrying the weight of what could have been. & the world, running out of grace, running to hell, for the fun of it. blame the wildflower’s lack of will to thrive on its own. blame the butterfly for its half wing.

and forget the small miscalculations of the universe.

Iyanuoluwa Adenle is a poet and essayist from Nigeria. She makes a conscious attempt to explore the basic human conditions based on grief, loss and love in her writings. Her works have appeared or are forthcoming in Kalahari Review, Africanwriter, Empty Mirror, The Hellebore and elsewhere.

some promise

part of me is more than willing to be wrong

to remain inside the circle of this

conversation

~Tony Hoagland

here i am again

small as ever

and looking out through a fringe

of bangs at someone i want to love

but cannot talk to—

not yet

this one shows some promise so i try again

reading “Muy Macho” as Rorschach

and watching his eyes for a tell—

for signs that he could swing

from the lines like the page was a tree in the jungle

of our entangled expectations

a little fear in the eyes is good

it means he’s paying attention

means he knows something might snap

and expose his hungry male mythology

right here on my couch and shit

it’s only our third date

but it’s not just that

truth is i need a witness

i want something on his face

to realize or recognize or maybe resemble—

something at the mouth or eyebrows

something that tells me he sees it too—

that says there he is

my father

slouched and enjambed where he’s been all along

which is a kind of everywhere-i-wasn’t-exactly-looking

and answering somehow

(always)

for this man and all the others—

saying

ask yourself again how guys like this keep finding you

i finish the poem

brush away my bangs

and look up at my date—waiting

for him to speak in his own voice

one more unusual man

lent to the chorus of baritones

I’ve spent a life auditioning

in unison now

sighing

telling me yes

yes darling

he got it right

Anna Weaver writes as a former soldier, a lover of flatlands, and a woman “with loyalties scattered over the landscape.” Her poems have appeared in Connotation Press, O-Dark-Thirty, and elsewhere, earning nominations for the Pushcart and other prizes. She lives in North Carolina with her two daughters.

Losing the Bed

Sometimes when my wife and I

make love, she loses feeling

in her legs. It surprised me

when it first happened, gave me

a false sense of confidence,

as if my skin against hers

was somehow the reason for

the dead weight, the twitching that

followed as she lay next to

me in the almost-dark. But

in truth, it’s a disease, her

heart’s inability to

pump blood throughout the body.

Last night I woke from a dream

in which the shadow of her

former self rose from the ash,

took me by the hand, walked me

down a long hallway toward

our past, only my feet were

the ones dragging on the floor

as my mind tripped over each

healthy memory of her,

how she used to play tennis

at the park, or pull the kids

in their little red wagon,

or push a grocery cart

down the aisles of the Wegmans.

Now when she is beside me

I am afraid, knowing what

she’s been forced to surrender,

how even the comfort of

our bed can’t make us feel safe,

can’t restore the world we knew,

can’t shield us from the sickness

we’ve become for even one

naked second of the day.

Robert Fillman is the author of the chapbook November Weather Spell. His poems have recently appeared in Nashville Review, Poet Lore, Salamander, Tar River Poetry, Valparaiso Poetry Review, and others. Fillman earned a Ph.D. in English from Lehigh University and is an Assistant Professor at Kutztown University.

Orfeo

I dreamed I heard a pan pipe’s unappeasable music.

The teacher said “Orfeo,” one song in the opera

Wounded Soldier. Aren’t all soldiers wounded?

Orpheus surely played that pan pipe music

for my own fallen warrior, grown, whose song

I’ll never hear again, singing to her children.

Some days, she once said, the first time

she was sick, I just have to sing a little.

The sky swirled over and around,

a few stars like motes floating through.

I woke up slowly, dreaming I was tied down by sheets

that coiled and bound.

(Did she struggle to get free,

held back by a body that was done with her?)

I untangled myself endlessly and woke up

to write it down, to write down as if I could,

where I’d been, where she might be

lost or unlost. Might not want us any more.

Did I think to map the infinite? I would have

dragged her, even unwilling, back into our little lives.

Anne Pitkin has work most recently published in the Alaska Quarterly Review and Prairie Schooner and forthcoming in Nelle. Work has appeared in One, Poetry (Chicago) New Orleans Review, Rattle, Verse Daily and many others. Her books are Yellow and Winter Arguments.

Plate Tectonics

Wet cool and pluvial

shaggy-natured the clouds roam

after ice dragged and puckered the earth Fault lines

shake from inside out cracking

the lithosphere

Orogeny

Nothing to blame on those old disturbances

called the mountains

Can’t you hear that rain fall sun dripping

as if in no time the sea bottoms came to point

up in the air Ascent of Shiva’s Pinnacle

in the canyon the rosy corals sunning all morning

Swaths of hematite and limestone

Gorge-dark evenings of silence Four months old

I could not see my father walk out the front door

on his way to war Blank check

to misery on Earth

That doorway

closed on years of lost calendars bodies

turned under It’s the unknown I miss Never am I missed

in love as I seem with absence

Katherine Soniat has published seven poetry collections, including Bright Stranger and The Swing Girl, both from LSU Press. The Goodbye Animals received the Turtle Island Quarterly Chapbook Award. Her work has been published in such journals as TriQuarterly, Poetry, Crazyhorse, Gettysburg Review, Antioch Review, New England Review, Kenyon Review, The Nation, New Republic, Georgia Review, and The Southern Review.

The Chocolate Factory

for Kenton Turner, 1958 – 2019

After you died I dreamed confusion—

strange airports and lost tickets,

neon signs and missed flights,

my glasses misplaced, long

corridors to nowhere, no one

to help me find my way through.

I dreamed playgrounds deserted,

chess games discarded, tossed out books,

box of dust, a child’s cape of red.

I dreamed Lucy & Ethel in the chocolate factory episode.

They were trying so hard to get it just right, grabbing

at candy all along the conveyor belt, scooping it,

stuffing it, madcap, into their mouths. All that candy

they couldn’t manage to wrap. Everything

passing too fast.

Robin Turner is a teaching artist in Dallas, Texas, and an online writing guide for homeschooled teens. She has recent work in deLuge, Glass Poets Resist, Unlost Journal, Sweet Tree Review, and Virga Magazine. Her chapbook, bindweed & crow poison, is available through Porkbelly Press.

My Brother’s Bedroom

Mother steps past the worn bedroom rug

and a kept bed, sheets crisp beneath,

bedspread fenced in brown and black

plaid. The tiny lamp on a nightstand remains,

its yellowed shade still smiling with cowboys

waist-deep in lasso circles, pistols and holsters.

From the window, she can spy the sagging

swing set, bent beam alive with the thrum

of a nest, rusty holes inhaling dark whispers

of wasps as they return from where they came

in the endless samsara of being. Each

day, my mother translated by glass, the room

a black veil behind her as she counts

the prodigal returns of each sleeping sting.

Ken Craft’s poems have appeared in The Writer’s Almanac, Verse Daily, Plainsong, Spillway, Slant, and numerous other journals and e-zines. He is the author of two collections of poetry, Lost Sherpa of Happiness (Kelsay Books, 2017) and The Indifferent World (Future Cycle Press, 2016).

“SANGER, CALIFORNIA—1979”

Of course you are not here

but you left me

these tilted telephone poles

of another era, a car I can almost

see, and a triangular warning sign

in bright red contrast to the deep

ochre and cobalt shadows crossing

the center line of the road.

It could be the way your dusky trees

in the background swell against

the horizon, amorphous there beyond

the vanishing point—which is of course

where you are now or almost

on the verge of taking your last breath—

but this road you gave me led me

into sleep so often

I’ll go down it now keeping track

and of course also not.

This garage on the right—I could pull into it

on an ordinary day, find perhaps a path

alongside, and a bungalow

a few paces ahead, its porch

half hidden by bushes. I’ll meet you there.

There must have been some ocean

in the air the day you painted this, maybe

that’s why the trees rise and fall

like waves and the sidewalk’s edges

seem so liquid, almost ebb and flow.

for Neil Frankenhauser (1939-2019)

Terry Blackhawk is the author of three chapbooks and five full-length collections of poetry, including Escape Artist (BkMk Press) selected by Molly Peacock for the John Ciardi Prize. Her most recent collection One Less River (Mayapple Press) made the Kirkus Reviews “Best 2019 Indie Poetry” list. She has poems in many journals and anthologies and on line at ONE, Verse Daily, Solstice, Interim and elsewhere.

Nearly One Thousand Full Moons

—for Debbie

The nearly one thousand full moons rising over Tashla

have not found the unmarked grave of Levi Isaac,

no stone that says age eleven, brother you never knew

though he lived with your family as an angel of grief,

for you, formless, ungraspable, hovering.

Every night the same moon plods its way from here

to Siberia and back, shining on that place where

earth took him up, where, could you find it,

you’d lay down your face, a blessing.

What is a brother? You must invent him:

colt legs kicking up snow glistening in moonlight,

laughing face teaching you to spit into the dust,

snapping of sticks over and over to drive you crazy.

His fingers lift the translucent snail from its leaf.

Little sister, do not be afraid. See how slowly it moves.

Kathleen A. Wakefield has published two books of poetry, Grip, Give and Sway (Silver Birch Press, 2016) and Notations on the Visible World (1999 Anhinga Prize for Poetry, 2000). She taught creative writing at the Eastman School of Music. She shares her love of poetry with children and adults through public libraries.

Kneel Said The Night

I sell mirrors

in the city of the blind. —Kabir

Kneel said the night

her full paunch moon mute



as I am. Ask for words said

the night instead. Instead,



a turning autumn path where

the shepherd and his dog



lead their x marked flock, where

morning’s cry is a hundred made



single bleat made soon

a thousand dry leafed whispers

— made sunrise — to its lover the breeze.



The lambs and sheep are x’ed for killing.

Hurry their soiled white woolen bodies as

one toward sun. Slaughter ahead but not



yet. And my own marked tongue

like a taut wound watch ticks

trees, ticks bodies, ticks the veiled



and the beheaded, ticks presidents,

ticks light. Ticks



stain I cannot say or bend.

Ticks last year’s dead.

This morning’s mute as a moon killed



The lambs will be meat before

any plea is answered.

The reddening forest can hear.



Urges syllables like breath to a fire.

Can speak to leaf, lamb, path, moss,

stone. — It can. Then I —.



Land, I mouth — hill of the dead —

as if a voice — I have heard of ancient

bones unearthed mere roads away from



here. Skeleton of sounds, poem,

kneel



said the night. Kneel with me now with

the slaughtered sheep,

in case there may be any reply.



—for us, for the Kurds, in solidarity and yes love for a humanity if there is any left—

Margo Berdeshevsky’s 5th collection is in the pipeline. Author of Before the Drought (Glass Lyre Press/a finalist for the National Poetry Series,) Between Soul & Stone, But a Passage in Wilderness, (Sheep Meadow Press,) Beautiful Soon Enough, (Univ. of Alabama Press,) recipient of 1st Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Award for FC2. Other honors include Robert H. Winner Award from Poetry Society of America.

O Florida

Winters were mild. We imported peyote,

practiced missionary acts on rattan mats.

Cockroaches waved their ludic feelers at us.

We faked our IDs.

Mr. Aycock, in Existential Lit,

taught us that free will is just like refusing

painkillers when sitting in the dentist’s chair.

It sounded easy.

Real flamingos hung out at the nearby pool,

idly standing on single legs to see us

walk the plank by falling off the diving board

because we felt free.

We scanned Sapphics and crammed marijuana seeds

in Louisiana Picayunes just to

blow smoke rings in the air near our professor,

a sad PhD.

Eels lurked in reeds that grew submerged in the lake

where we waterskied. Nearby, cypress trees were

strung with curlicues of gray-green Spanish moss.

Our own Innisfree.

Bonnie Naradzay’s poems have appeared in New Letters (Pushcart nomination), RHINO, Tampa Review, The American Journal of Poetry, EPOCH, Poet Lore, Pinch (Pushcart nomination), The Ekphrastic Review, Split This Rock, Kenyon Review Online, AGNI, and elsewhere. She leads poetry workshops in a homeless day shelter and a retirement center, both in Washington DC.