Category Archives: Uncategorized

Blue Collar Angel

Dad woke me at 2 a.m.
It was hard to leave a warm bed
and a cherry-colored dream.
“It’s time for us to go to work,” Dad said,
“to buy fruit and vegetables for our store.”

It was bitter cold outside.
The winds rattled the double-pane windows
and the snow came down
hard and heavy
over the darkened houses of our street.

But I could not refuse.
Dad was my blue-collar angel
who told me to wear my long johns
and a heavy coat with the fleece-lined hood.
“And don’t forget your galoshes,” he reminded.

So, I wiped the crust from my eyes,
and left the comfort of the woolen blankets
as we made our way decisively
through the slushy streets of Philadelphia
into the soul of an unforgiving winter.
The two of us, breaking the silence of the morning.

Mark Tulin is a former therapist who lives in California. Mark has two poetry books available at Amazon, Magical Yogis and Awkward Grace. The Asthmatic Kid and Other Stories will be published in August of 2020. He’s been featured in Poetry Village, Oddball Magazine, Poppy Road Review, among others.  Follow Mark at Crow On The Wire.

Planetary

—like hopping on a moving train,
my duffel in hand: someone’s shouting,
maybe at me.

Either you escort me somewhere
or something else carries you.
You dreamed for years of California:
you said, our house may be smaller,
but sun will drench our evenings
(I’d just shoveled our porch
that sludgy Christmas in Vermont)
and your vision, like a planet, bloomed in my mind.
I saw gardens of exotic succulents
on a block of bungalows, so close to a beach
salt-breezes seasoned our meals.

Next, you wove fables around the synagogue:
somehow, our children—if we had them—would flower
in the canopy of my mother’s faith.

But nothing agreed to remain itself.
Not the language of computer coding,
not the markets for your whimsical figurines—
the dinosaur that folds into a car,
the astronaut whose movable arms
appear to dance and swim.
Not the faces of our friends
(Al’s, collapsed in bels palsy and depression,
Stella’s and Dave’s, whisked into memory
when he got hired in Japan),
nor my own, sagging and greying
as you reassessed your dreams.

We met in Milwaukee
(that bar’s now a small grocery store),
Springsteen blaring on the speakers.
You wore earrings then: planet earths, dangling
toward your shoulders.
I opened with a cliché:
something like, is the world your oyster?
You retorted, staring straight into me:
didn’t I think everything was possible?

Jesse Wolfe is a professor of English at California State University, Stanislaus. He is the author of Bloomsbury, Modernism, and the Reinvention of Intimacy (Cambridge UP, 2011) and the recipient of an award from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Wolfe is the winner of the Hill-Müller Poetry and August Derleth Poetry Contests, and his work has been published in New Millennium Writings, Penumbra, Red River Review, River Poets Journal, Henniker Review, Shanti, and elsewhere.

Cape of Good Hope
For my father

Half of you is listening. Half of you sees the mountain, hard lines pushing against the sky. Half of you senses air’s faint breath, feels warmth like fingers where sunlight has sneaked beneath your hat. Your left hand acknowledges my touch.
I only half listened that day last year, as we walked through the fynbos on the slopes above Camps Bay. You spoke in the voice you used for children or for childhood, for stories of Piglet and of Pooh and how you were at school with Christopher Robin.
When the time comes, I want a Daddy to hold me by the hand.
I smiled, said nothing. We were a long way from The Hundred Acres Wood.
Spiked crests of birds of paradise ignite above their leaves. Half of you is present. Is the other half hidden, like the mountain when the south-east wind spreads a tablecloth of cloud? Or has your Daddy taken your right hand gently in His own, to lead the missing half of you past Lion’s Head into the light?
I don’t ask this, but I think this in the shadow of the mountain. Half of you listens to my silence. All of you cannot speak.

Marian Christie’s poetry has appeared in, among others, Allegro, Black Bough, Independent Variable and Pushing out the Boat. When not writing or reading poetry, Marian looks at the stars, puzzles over the laws of physics, listens to birdsong and crochets gifts for her grandchildren. She lives in Kent.
Website: https://marianchristiepoetry.net/
Twitter: @marian_v_o.

Easter Haiku

White cherries bloom
Through all the world. To them too:
“Hail, He is risen.”

Lilies trumpeting,
For Solomon shall be arrayed
Like one of these.

No rose yet,
But between the thorns,
The rosebud.

The old apple seed
Dies in the earth. Up springs
The Tree in blossom.

Winter passes.
Steadfast in the snow
Stands the Evergreen.

By day R.A. Lott works in academic administration at the University of Toronto, and by night she writes and translates poetry. Her pieces have appeared in First Things, Christian Century, and a number of smaller periodicals.

Myself, Looking Back
at Fountains Abbey

Sometime in the future I will be born
here, in this place
where water is woven with light
and reflection on reflection stretches
to the horizon

images that break
with the cry of a bird and the rippling beat
of wings

cracks that drip chanted prayers
through my bones.

Everything is muffled
by moss and guarded by ivy, not quite reclaimed
by time.

Sometime, long ago, I think I died here,

my skin nothing
but the horizon of time.

Immense, boundless.
Blue reflected on blue.

.

Elodie Rose Barnes is an author and photographer. She can usually be found in Spain, Paris or the UK, daydreaming her way back to the 1920s, while her words live in places such as Dust Poetry, Bold + Italic and trampset. Current projects include two chapbooks of poetry, and a novel-in-flash on the life of modernist writer Djuna Barnes. Find her online at http://elodierosebarnes.weebly.com, and on Twitter @BarnesElodie.

BOOM

and hope is painted
like a dogwood over a penny farthing
daguerreotyped for so long
like gardens on verandas
with little haggling leaves
or sons rapt with leatherwork
hair caught in their fingers
their foreboding gone for Lent

Dallis grass and moons like Ganymede
worlds made from hot matter, melted and bent
and Man watches from an airy railcar
ever set apart from the symphony

ascend to hallelujah
from sea ice to rice paddies
Taconic Mountains
all rolling and gone
raven on a branch
flicks her braided wings
brushes the horses
that remain unbranded
and in the knapweed
rhymes, Vesuvian
all bold and rabbity
connect us to the symphony

reflect back to us
our panicked need
reflect back to us
our panicked need

C.T. McClintock lives her best life in Brooklyn. She is a Doctoral Fellow at St. John’s University in Queens where she teaches undergraduate writing and works as the Assistant Editor of the St. John’s Humanities Review. Follow her on Instagram (@c.t.mcclintock) for her latest writing.

Cope

To cope: from kolaphos, ‘blow with the fist’
via Latin, Old French to Middle English,
to cope: to meet in battle, come to blows.

To cope: to struggle on fairly even terms,
or with some success; or, to handle;
to withstand; to match oneself against.

To cope: to barter, trade, exchange, from the
now obsolete meaning ‘to traffic’, used
in North Sea Trade, from the Flemish version
of the Germanic source of the English word
for ‘cheap’; to make return for, to requite.

To cope: to cut and form a mitred joint.

To cope: to clip or dull the beak or talons
of a hawk, from the French couper, ‘to cut’.

Cope (noun): the cape-like vestments of a priest;
the sky (Milton’s ‘starry cope of heaven’);
the covering course of a sloping wall;
in foundry, the top of a sand casting mould.

Naomi Marklew lives in Durham in the North of England, where she moved to study poetry in 2007. She writes poems and blogs at poeticpotential.blogspot.com.

In The Midst Of Grace

Peace to the right of me,
compassion to the left of me,
Maundy Thursday everywhere.
I’m here as the designated driver
with a promise to behave. My
daughter, a newly minted Catholic,
has found a safe haven for her soul
which needs tethering in something
besides her self. Mass comes to an end,
answering at least one prayer.
Peace in Christ’s love is pressed
upon us from neighbors we’ve never
met, which is more of a spotlight than
my daughter can bear, so I smile a
few words to divert attention my way.
A vague calm passes over her face;
the spirit talked about so much tonight
escorts us to the door without comment.

On the way home she asks:
“Why didn’t they wash everyone’s feet?”

Carl Mayfield lives and writes in the American Southwest. Recent work can be found in Plum Tree Tavern, Abbey, Skidrow Penthouse.

age of physics

the quantum bits
zap in and out
where? where? where?
my father comes and goes
and comes is it some
other chair in some
other nursing home that
holds the man I knew
when he disappears from
here and reappears is
the food better there?
can he still play cribbage
and laugh and recognize
some alternative son in
that place to which he
flickers right before my
eyes? Is he a wave there
still afroth with possibilities
so different from the particles
of himself that seem to drop
like pieces of personhood dried
and falling like last year’s snow?

.

Wayne-Daniel Berard, PhD, teaches Humanities at Nichols College, Dudley, MA. He publishes broadly in poetry, fiction, and non-fiction. His novella, Everything We Want, was published in 2018 by Bloodstone Press. A poetry collection, The Realm of Blessing, will be published in 2020 by Unsolicited Press.

Rain Morning

needle fine the rain
etches the view:

gingerbread roofs
pebbledash
between
the burdened lilac blooms,

finer still the cast of thought—
catching already
what it doesn’t see—
names, between sight
and sight, itself:
grey suburban
day.

Blue tits sway the leafy spindles
fly on,
blue green leaves in the wind

where in the giant sky
a climbing cloud bank
slides along a silver field
fraying into rain,
fading

there between light and light
we see.