Category Archives: Uncategorized

When December Runs Off with the Light

We sense the passion is seasonal, that life
doesn’t move in only one direction, even though
these sawed-off days are hard to sing about.

The afternoon dissolves at four, making us
wonder what we did with our summer wages.
Our summer wages wonder about that too.
No matter. As long as we’re warm to the touch
a chance remains, we can love the light as it
passes through us, pulling us along to solstice
when the sun remembers to pivot, climbing
slowly higher in the sky, carrying good news
in outstretched arms we’re too blind to see.

Carl Mayfield has recent work in Miramar, Wales Haiku Journal, and Slipstream. His most recent chapbook is I Would Also Like To Mention Biscuits & Gravy.

The Better Reflection

I looked over the rusted railing to the dark water swirling around the bridge pylons–my hands began to tremble. I had a passing urge to do a sailor dive into the river. I wanted a Xanax and a beer or two to level me off. “This was a mistake coming here. I should have come alone, not burden you.”

The state highway bled tar like ribbons of black licorice. The oily smell was gone once my girlfriend Liz and I got to the dirt road that snaked along the river. We passed through mayfly swarms that moved like mist from the water. The insects were like a prickly gauze over our eyes. We came to a sharp bend in the road and heard the sound of singing and clapping hands off in the distance. As we walked further the singing got louder and we could finally see people along

the riverbank in white robes. In a clearing there was a flat area with parked cars. Some from the group were wet from the immersions, their white robes stained by the swirling mud and grit. The newly minted baptized carried the smell of the river like a halo.
“How many washed souls today?” I asked the man with a clerical collar.
“Six souls, washed in the water of the Jordan. Hallelujah, Brother!” The preacher dabbed his forehead with a red handkerchief — an earthy, mineral smell rose from his drying clothes.
“I used to come here as a kid. The town had a concession stand, lifeguards and there were two wooden rafts anchored in the river,” I said to the preacher.
“You actually swam in this?” Liz asked, shielding her blue eyes from the July sun. She walked to the edge of the river and reached her hand into the water. “Cold as cucumbers. I wouldn’t go in there on a bet.” She pulled a flat stone from the water and skipped it over the smooth dark surface. She counted three skips. “Not on a bet! If this was such a great place to swim, why was the beach closed?” Liz asked.
“The town ran out of money to keep it going. The liability insurance got too expensive. A place like this could fix alot of kids. A place to hangout, that’s what they need. This cold water could fix anything,” I said.

My hands trembled as the preacher spoke about redemption and forgiveness. We talked about my older brother who died twenty-five years ago. He drowned here in the river and I stood in the shallow water and watched. My mother said I was a coward. She never let me forget it.

The preacher says the water’s just a symbol, but it heals like nothing else if we let it. He lifted me out of the water into the calm light of day. The darkness rolled off me like soft rain from a child’s face. It seemed like an eternity before I opened my eyes. I focused on the shimmering light as it danced around the broken surface of water, slowly revealing the better reflection of a new day.

William R. Stoddart is a poet and short fiction writer who lives in the suburbs of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. His work has appeared in Neologism Poetry Journal, Adirondack Review, Ruminate Magazine, Pedestal Magazine, Every Day Fiction and other publications.

The Unfolding Earth

Wind attracts wind,

sound comes along,

with seeds and a different dirt,

as the sea drags anything loose,

plants it where it has never belonged,

strange slate, a plant desperate for land.

Life wants itself. Will pay any price.

Are we the only species that mulls the past

incessently, invest futures of jewels and virgins,

of heavenly hosts singing

beyond this land under our terrible feet?

We’re dying to get there, love.

::

Wind

              and

   the sea

                               desperate for land

                         Will

incessently invest                jewels and

    heavenly           singing

                                      , love

;;

                                                      land

incessantly

                              singing

                                       love

Marilyn McCabe‘s work has garnered her an Orlando Prize from A Room of Her Own, the Hilary Tham Capital Collection contest award from The Word Works resulting in publication of her book of poems Perpetual Motion, and two artist grants from the New York State Council on the Arts. Her second book of poems, Glass Factory, was published in 2016. Her poems and videopoetry have been published in a variety of print and online literary magazines. She blogs about writing and reading at Owrite:marilynonaroll.wordpress.com.

Holocene

The shoreline has no recollection of the ice;
only the genetic memory of suffocation, smothering,

of cold, silent fingers playing at the clay of the Earth,
sundering rocks. There are only echoes, hearsay,

the whisper of older waters – receded, replenished –
forests, hills, a whole continent swallowed below.

Becoming a pixel in the image, a word of the story,
I press footmarks through a knotted dunescape

to arrive, human, upon it, eyes finally registering
only in the present tense, shouldering my own tide.

Robert Ford‘s poetry has appeared in print and online publications in the UK, US and elsewhere, including The Interpreter’s House, Brittle Star, Butcher’s Dog and San Pedro River Review. More of his work can be found at https://wezzlehead.wordpress.com/

Parthenogenesis

She crept beneath the leaves, her body a shadow of running water.
Calling on Saint Anne she manifested her own miracle.
Her lashing muscles smoothed the earth, her waters crisped the hanging air.
………………..The hovel, remade in her image, became a bower.
She tasted the fire from the kiln between her rows of teeth.
Her blood upon the earth called for heaven’s reply,
………………..and the moon descended.
The watery orb burst upon her tongue and three hatchlings fell,
………………..spasming,
into the cradle of heaped up stones.
One of her children — one of her selves —
………………..did not survive. And she lamented.
But the world exhaled a celebratory prayer:
one fewer heav(enl)y body with distinctive marks
to twine around a stranger’s leg.
One fewer set of sharpened teeth
to sink themselves into a stranger’s heel.

The Dreamers Anthology: Writing Inspired by the lives of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and Anne Frank Edited by Janette Schafer, Cedric Rudolph and Matthew Ussia, Social Justice Anthologies, Publication affiliate of Beautiful Cadaver Project, Pittsburgh.

Review by Sarah Law

I was sent this anthology, of primarily but not exclusively poetry, over the course of last year and it’s a really strong one with a striking premise. Civil rights campaigner Dr Martin Luther King Jr and diarist Anne Frank were both born in 1929. The book, published last year, commemorates what would have been the 90th birthday of both. On finding this out, Janette Schafer comments in her introduction, ‘My first thought was, what would these two have to say to each other had they the opportunity to meet?’ Their ideas, their resilience, and their dreams meet and are celebrated here. Contributions are not bound specifically to explore the lives of either Luther King or Frank, although many do in ways that are poignant and lyrical. But all the pieces reflect in some ways on human talent and bravery in the face of persecution. Some have a confessional tone or are memoirs in miniature, others are more objective and innovatively written.

The anthology is structured, quite loosely, into five sections, each acknowledging notable dates for either Frank or Luther King – the first, ‘Voices’, June 14th 1942, for example, is the date Anne Frank begins her diary. ‘Darkness’, is prefaced by April 15th, 1945, the date British troops liberate Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Its stated theme is, again, treated both specifically and more tangentially. The horror of the Holocaust is something that (as Matthew Ussia notes in ‘The Morning after Antwon Rose was Murdered by a White Police Officer’) the philosopher Adorno suggested should put an end to poetry. But here are many unflinching examples of the difficult poetry of imagined witness and of elegy. Resonant detail and thoughtful phrasing are the keys to several powerful pieces, such as ‘fetters of silence’ in Nina Pick’s ‘Photo of the Deportation’.

Subsequent sections, ‘Resistance’, ‘Liberation’ and ‘Legacy’ broaden the anthology’s themes and tone. Imprisonment takes many forms – repression is an intersectional experience and can be political and gendered as well as racially oppressive – and the poems acknowledge this in their variety (Wendy Paff’s ‘Deep Creek MD in the Era of Trump’; Arlene Gay Levine’s ‘I am a Woman’). While there are striking threads right through the anthology which trace the lives, deaths and legacies of the two titular figures (for example the adjacent ‘Flight’ by Carrie Albert, and ‘Independence Day’ by Matt Kohut), many other voices and dramatic fragments are evoked by the end, a rising chorus of voices, in fact, demanding poetic respect as well as some serious soul-searching on the part of the reader. Some present contemporary injustices as a clear echo of past atrocities, such as ‘”Nation of Immigrants” Removed from Mission Statement’ by Daniella Buccilli, a hard-hitting poem which opens with: ‘Expired paperwork is a violation beyond redemption in times of nationalism.’

Just in terms of skill and craft, this anthology has an impressive poetic reach. I particularly liked Devon Balwit’s ‘Abcedarian’ poems – the first starts:

Antennae – not horns – are what Jews have, the
better to test the prevailing winds, for the
careless, the cocksure, go down. it
doesn’t matter the century, the decade. …

and Nancy Flynn’s extraordinary found/erasure poem, ‘Still Birmingham’, based on Luther King’s ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail’ on April 16, 1963:

‘Your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your daughter why, see ominous clouds of inferiority form in her mental sky./ Concoct an answer for a son who is asking: “why do white people treat colored people so mean?”‘

It was also good to see some longer poems in here, such as Maureen Doallas’s ‘Anne’; a multi-page poem, intercalating some of Frank’s own writing, that gives its subject room to breathe. Here’s the start:

Goodness happens
even when it does not.

A diary begins on the day
it is written and everything
goes so fast.

The breakfast dishes are left on the table
and a cat gets the only goodbye.

To be 13 when the world is
on fire and it is pouring rain
and your sister, 16, is summoned means

We shall disappear of our own
accord and not wait until they come
and fetch us.

There are also some beautifully pared-down poems, such as Schafer’s own ‘Things that are not Dogs’ and Amanda Woomer’s ‘the holiest’. Woomer’s poem makes explicit what is implicit throughout the anthology; namely that all human life is valuable and sacred, intrinsically worthy of respect and remembrance: ‘we live/ we love/ we die/ the holiest’, a sentiment echoed in the letter-poem by Karen Poppy that concludes the book: ‘she [Frank] would have noted…the miracle of each of our lives, that we exist at all…’

I don’t want to neglect the prose in this anthology however. There is a fiercely thought-provoking essay by Mark Blickley on the ‘recruitment’ ethos of Arlington Cemetery (described as ‘the theme-park brainchild of the Pentagon’), and a great one-woman playscript celebrating American lawyer and social activist Bella Abzug, ‘Playing House’ by Coni Ciongoli Koepfinger.

Creative writing necessarily involves a certain amount of imaginative vision, of dreaming. Martin Luther King’s famous speech is of course predicated on his dream of social justice. This anthology honours our present day dreamers as well as those so important in the past, but it is not willing to accept that freedom and justice are only ‘a dream deferred’ (to use Langston Hughes’ phrase); the pieces here challenge privilege, and call out the slowness to change of those who have the most privilege. Not least, this anthology is a call to action. Racial hate crime and antisemitism are both still shockingly present in the world, and must be decried and defeated by both words and deeds. Reading The Dreamers Anthology is an inspiring place to start.

Sarah Law

Re- (A, The, A)

Re-see the high mast bobbing
us, those mythic explorers.
Okay, not acknowledged in foundational
schematics the ways my brother and I
asked our mother to glue toilet paper rolls together
telescoping imaginations of ibises flying over
green-waves. Some might say it is so, but they
have the wrong idea. Recapture lost treasure.
Daresay: The holy mysteries are still there tomorrow?
Walk on water, hold your breath.

Andrew Hutto is originally from north Georgia but currently writes out of Kentucky. He recently graduated from the University of Louisville with a degree in English. His sonnet was selected for the Hands and Feet Poetry Derby at Churchill Downs. In the summer of 2019, he served as a preliminary judge for the Louisville Literary Arts Writer’s Block fiction prize. His poetry appears in Thrush and is forthcoming in Barnhouse and Eunoia Review. For more information visit www.andrewhutto.org

I want to believe

‘You’ll find a nice boyfriend soon’ she said.
My aunt, with her humongous strength. Her raucous,
cigaretted laughter and Celtic black hair.

In her matchstick box kitchen, with her kind heart, she
finagled me into her world of faith.
‘He believes in you even if you don’t believe in him’, she said.

And I wanted to believe; like Fox Mulder and his poster.

Claire Sexton is a fifty year old librarian living in Berkshire, but originally from Wales. She lived in London for twenty years and is currently detoxing from this experience. She has been published in Ink, Sweat and Tears, Foxglove Journal, Amethyst Review, and Light: a Journal of Photography and Poetry.

Beneath our Feet and In Our Hands

Jack Frost is curled up napping
In my bones.
Backyard grass crunches
Beneath my feet.
Summer sunflowers hibernate
In my heart.

Could it be—
When I hold this dried out husk
Springtime rests on wintertide fingertips?
Death—birth—
Tender-strong sugar snap seedlings
Unfurl from soil-stained shells,
And burst through splashing earth
Gasping for the sun—

Storied dirt collects under ungloved fingernails,
We plant seeds of sensuous new seasons.
Infinitesimal harbingers of arugula and radishes;
Sealed wombs of history repeating itself:
The farmhand mama is a sinewy ghost now, her
belly a tomb of memories; wasting away
workers harvesting fecund fields
on empty stomachs to satisfy
other people’s ravenous appetites.

Dirt weeps sometimes too.
We dare not forget
What remembering sows
In our bodies.
We are braver than we want to be
In our bones.
When we take our shoes off,
We absorb holy ground nutrients
Beneath our feet.
And we water with tears
This garden we hold
In our hands.

Jill Crainshaw is a professor at Wake Forest University School of Divinity in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Her poetry explores connections between the sacred and everyday life.