Jasper's Folly Poetry Journal (Issue #1)

Edited by Jeffrey Spahr-Summers

Jasper’s Folly Poetry Journal

Issue #1, January 2023 (Poetry/Photography)

ISBN # 978-1-387-41716-2

Cherry

Boulder

All rights reserved

Photography Copyright, Jeffrey Spahr-Summers, 2023

Copyright Cherry Publications, Jeffrey Spahr-Summers, 2023

All rights revert to the original authors upon publication www.jaspersfollypoetryjournal.com

Editor’s Note

Welcome to the inaugural issue of Jasper’s Folly Poetry Journal.

We present 49 talented poets from a dozen countries, including a dozen poets from my own home state of Colorado. Friends, an ex-roommate, acquaintances, strangers all present here.

Jeffrey Spahr-Summers, Editor.

Please visit our website, www.jaspersfollypoetryjournal.com for Submission Guidelines.

13 - RICHARD FLEMING – Icarus

14 - G. TIMOTHY GORDON - The Swells

My Negative Incapability: Last Suppers (& Testament) Parallax View

14 - JEFFREY SPAHR-SUMMERS - thrust orange house - 20 crow moon – 35 moon - 40 pink tree blues – 43 apples – 54 the crying tree – 67 lake water strider w/ Brian Barnett – 73 camillia – 98 90 proof – 120 What If? #14 w/ Eric Fischman – 123 the bird museum – 126 electra – 137 color the fall – 144 cluster – 145

gentle fog river w/ Brian Barnett – 148 scott fraser denver art museum – 164 after the party – 176 foundation – 180 blue trees – 184

Fear of Sleep w/ Dennis Bernstein – 191 lemon – 193 elephant memories – 197 unit f-f-f w/ J.D. Nelson – 198 red tree – 201 sunspot – 206 elemental – 208 umbrella – 210 890 sq. ft. of reality – 212 cluster fuck – 215 red tree 2 – 219 purple much - 222 dreamy – 224 fall – 229 electric beets – 235 lightning strike – 241 quartered – 247

18 - AMY IRISH - The Angels Underground

Like Fish Another Kind of Hunger In Winter

When We Erupt 28 - DON NARKEVIC - (Statistically, Darby Has Yet to Die in West Virginia) 30 - BRUCE MCRAE - In and Of From a Noose Omen Confessions in Bedlam Talent Show Auditions 38 - GREGG SHAPIRO - Famous Insomniacs 39 - MARK J. MITCHELL - A Pacifist at the Chessboard 41 - MARIE C. LECRIVAIN - The Mockingbird and Minotaur

Why David Carradine Was a Karmic Masochist

The Emperor (IV)

The 1002nd Arabian Night What’s Your Sign? 52 - ABIGAIL ELIZABETH OTTLEY - The Starveling Magpie 53 - BRICE MAIURRO - Traffic

Unbirthday

When I look in the mirror:

Motivation

68 - MICHAEL BROCKLEY - Love Poem to Il Mare

La Ville-Lumiere

Aloha Shirt Man’s Nativity Night beneath the Christmas Star The Table of Misfit School Psychologists

73 - BRIAN BARNETT - lake water strider w/ Jeffrey Spahr-Summers gentle fog river w/ Jeffrey Spahr-Summers - 148 74 - J.B. MULLIGAN - the house of man Old Hands 99 - DAN FIJOLEK - Firewalking 100 - JENNIFER SCHNEIDER - A Poem on the Attack on Salman Rushdie a collection of august recollections :: in four-wheel drive on hunger pains & kitchen mines vines Rumbles and Rambles :: On Worms, Altitudes, and Overly Lost Time 118 - DAVID LAWTON - Chiller 121 - ERIC FISCHMAN - Edith Keller Must Die*

What If? #14 Walk

Love Letter from a City Street Mistranslation of the Cascajal Block

128 - DAVID WILLIAMS - Mister Rogers Raymond Chandler Carver

131 - CHARA BOOKER - Lost 6 to 3

133 - STEPHEN MEAD - Shoe beneath the Stairs

His Mind’s Inclined to Math Precious Jade Cities Bestiary Lessons

145 - NICHOLAS GENTILE - Tripping in the Sixties #2 146 - STEVEN BRUCE - Aphotic Fragment 149 - MAGGIE SAUNDERS - burnout the virtue

150 - MATT CLIFFORD - You win…

king of the stars… what the fuck would you know about forgiveness at four in the morning?

I’d like to be the manager that i may talk to myself…

The president is listening…

165 - TENDAI MWANAKA - A Flag as a Makeshift Alter

166 - KIRSTY A. NIVEN - Cycles

The Bottom Hesitation Marks Dark Star Love Lockdown

171 - MORGHAN LEIGH - Patio Petrichor

173 - DAVE PRATHER - Journal Entry: The Light at Night

Bert Bug Journal Entry: After Considering Not Planting a Garden Picasso Bug

177 - GEORGE PESTANA - Burning

187 - DENNIS J. BERNSTEIN - Up in Smoke

Fear of Sleep w/ Jeffrey Spahr-Summers

192 - TOM ZIMMERMAN - I Lived in Iowa

I Was a Whale I’ve Been Re-minded Lately

196 - JOAN MCNERNEY - Falling Asleep

198 - J.D. NELSON - unit f-f-f w/ Jeffrey Spahr-Summers

199 - JULIE K. SHAVIN - Penultimate Days

Sweet High Bath of Unknowing All in Order and True Marionettes Among Us

207 - OJO OLUMIDE EMMANUEL - Fire is a Metaphor for a Country Dancing Naked Inside the Rain

209 - DEE ALLEN - 21st Century Pursue

213 - ROBERT KNOX - Ancient Letters

Beauty, Use Chair People

All Those Homely Longings

Prosopagnosia

221 - NICK BRUNO - Disassembling Marconi 223 - JUANITA REY - People Apart 225 - CHARLIE ROBERT - Cold Snap in the Bayou Winter Barn Ice Fishing on Capital Lake 228 - BEN BARRETT - Hand’s Been Dealt 230 - BENJAMIN NAMBU - Festival of Dreams 232 - MARY K. CAIN - Aeolian Into the Dark 236 - GERRY FABIAN - Don’t Regurgitate Love Complex Connotation 239 - PAT CONNORS - What I Do for a Living 240 - BENNA GAEAN MARIS - cognitions of uneasiness the faintest caress 243 - THOM BAKELAS - october poem 245 - MICHEAL BROWNSTEIN - A Break in the Line of Time 248 - VALERIE A. SZAREK - Bone Games

Icarus

I am falling from high but they do not notice.

The air, through wings that promised much, keens like a mourner.

Creeping ants below evolve to shepherd, ploughman, angler.

I fall unseen. Someone will dream it later.

I have no time to scream.

The water is hard as stone.

The Swells

No struck-dumb-dawn lights the secret lives of desert brutes crunched beneath grit, bunchgrass emptiness, brazen, spooked, upthrust shapes to heaven, spikey Desert lily looking nothing like Lily, while up and down curated Sonoma Ranch and Fire Mtn hibiscus hedgerows plum and ruby bloom until glow-lightly-moon-and-starlight draws the blind out under pitch-perfect night, behold themselves fearfully, wonderfully made, shining among the swells.

My Negative Incapability: Last Suppers (& Testament)

September 2022

√Willow bowls of catkin-spring winds.

√Summer amuse bouche: sea salt seasoned.

√Mid-autumn lantern lighting feast, Rabbit-in-Chang’e-mooncake-night.

√Glazed-white icing New Year sweet rice balls.

√(Much lesser Wight, name writ wholly in water.)

Parallax View

Mt. Fuji, Honshu Island

At its cone-knoll crest recalled snow, an ocean away, faintly seen, but felt, falling in fading late summer light, plucked from pure serene then, as now, in mind’s-eye, slow way whitely down as ghostly as Sonoran from dry airy nothing peppering garden burn on short May notice.

The Angels Underground

When I planted my heartshaped spade into the Earth, Began digging in her rain-fresh wonder, I flew fathoms down. Deep into the Earth’s memory

I dove, through history’s permafrost.

As my shovel turned the decades, seeking soil to transform my darkness into growth,

The Earth revealed a holy messenger the mother of all worms. Fat as my thumb

And sinuous as a garden snake, but never mistaken for that messenger

Of forked roads. This seraph curled instinctively back to ground, its true north, Rapturously pointing out the direction of Eden, where all fresh starts belong.

Perhaps you seasoned gardeners have seen greater. Perhaps you have even communed With a whole underground host. But in my decades of fruitless digging

For a land to plant my pitted heart, this angel of the Earth was my first,

And at last an indication that I’m finally putting down roots.

Spahr-Summers

orange house

Like Fish

the plural of haiku is haiku – Steph Kelln, author

The school of haiku swims as one across the pages, each a beautiful moment a swirl in its own current while also woven through time together, forever plumbing the depths of this poetic ocean.

The multiple of haiku moves en masse, bright scales silvering the water as one, yet each singular of skin and heart, each lifting up each other in praise of their different lengths of lines, their finned accoutrements of moon and flower.

of Ten Thousand Syllables

The plural of haiku doubles back and mirrors, duplicates and amplifies, blurring into one great body of words, while always diverging into infinite new directions, flashing seamlessly from the page’s water and into the eye, the world.

Another Kind of Hunger

On dark days, I open the cupboard. On days of war and illness, I cook.

The spices tell me this is no time to soften pain under a snowfall of sugar. Today is for ginger and cumin and curry, sautéing in the saucepan. Today is for slicing zucchini into paper-fine circles that curl in the sizzling oil. Today is for chopping onions into meaty chunks and tossing them in by the handful. Today is for pureeing the garlic and blending the basil and zesting the lemon and mixing the contradictory tastes together until they become something entirely new. Today is for slathering the whole creamy mess on ruby salmon flesh and steaming it through. Today is for piling the family table high with food that defies simple taste, providing richness and depth on the palate to remind my family that their hunger for life should not, must not be diminished. Because the family table is my altar, and with every offering I lay there I say that despite the darkness, it is still delicious to be alive. And the full-bodied flavor of living is sacred, still.

In Winter

after The Wild Iris by Louise Gluck

Should I envy the date palm, the ginger and hibiscus, in the humid hothouses of the north, unable to flourish under such bitter sun?

Some say we don’t die with the seasons. Believe we don’t constrict under peril, don’t perish (in truth or metaphor) seeking rebirth in possibility and warmth.

The iris would be shocked to discover that some don’t die on a daily basis. Don’t struggle until thrust from greenhouse shelter and life’s weather fells them fully.

This winter, I stood lifeless with the iris again. But today, the cold retracted from my touch, the wet thaw of my roots released. With no time or energy to envy, I urgently re-furled my toes, pulled my life upward into the slowly returning light.

When We Erupt

After Vesuvius our tongues lie mute, coated ashy with snowflakes burning icy hot.

After Vesuvius we are smothered, crumbling and gray under the weight of our dark rain.

After Vesuvius we are a hollow nest, a shell where a thing alive once sheltered.

After Vesuvius we escape body but not spirit, still entombed in our self-destruction.

After Vesuvius, long after, we are excavated and examined, finally forced to acknowledge Our own shaking fault-lines, our own parts in the tragedy

How we said nothing as tension built. How we ignored the signs and stayed.

After Vesuvius we fly, becoming the dust at our own funeral rites. And after that, at long last, we are released.

[Statistically, Darby Has Yet to Die in West Virginia]

At twenty-seven, Darby’s heart peters out in the bath tub like Jim Morrison’s. Her eight-year-old daughter, Ava, finds the body, giggles at Mommy sleeping naked underwater. After too much silence, Ava walks downstairs to wake Grandma who cannot climb stairs. Before the neighbor gal calls 911, she steals the meth and pipe.

[They don’t tell you these things in newspapers.]

The body will not be buried in Paris, no candlelight vigil organized, no flower children weeping, her friends tweaking, no autopsy ordered, no graveside photos of little Ava, the body remaining a fragment of data until the year-end’s reckoning.

[Statistically, Darby has yet to die in West Virginia.]

In and Of

A painting of the world as it is in the moment. Including turtles and tax returns. Including carnations and Palo Verde. With candlewax and dog-bark and cod roe, the myopic painter mixing metaphors. He stirs colours. In this painting are a pig’s knuckles and thigh bone of a Chaldean general. There’s a coin dropped down a grate, neither head nor tails. A child is bawling for its mother.

There’s a car crash on the autobahn, of which death is certain.

A deft hand has shaped a horse’s mane and braid of wheat-coloured grasses. It’s captured light’s moody temperament, sunsets of pinks and purpled strands. A contented cow. A miserable coxswain.

Millions of years in the making, this painting contains pocket lint and buttons of ivory. And there are you and I, we’re walking by the mill, the artist having it rain. Impeccably portrayed, we seem oblivious to time and suffering.

Stood defiant to death’s erasure.

From a Noose

Bedeviled insurrectionists, once so bold, but their outed plans had you excluded.

Various witches, their charms and curses assuring love-loss or unnatural manners.

A man already dead, bar his dying. A murderist, who murdered twice and twice again.

Our good queen Madge, minus crown and influence, her consort prince put paid to with potent poisons.

Hanging like blackened fruit gone to seed. Like snow-laden tree branches in a wintry forest.

The laureate of thieves and jackals. The apothecary’s assistant, salt in his veins.

Hanging like a tapestry of unstitched sorrow –the pallid waif for want of dinner.

Omen

A bird in the house means a loved one is about to die. Riches are coming your way. The lost will return to you after an impossible journey.

Unlike a bat or bug, a bird in the house presages madness. It means love is broken. Calamity is imminent.

A bird in the house warns of a secret spent. It forecasts a hard winter. That however much you prepare you’re never ready.

Confessions in Bedlam

Let the madness begin afresh. Ignition plus sparks plus gasoline. The geomancy of cereologists. Priests defrocked of God and sin, fine lunatics on a busman’s holiday, I see England, I see France... counting bricks in Coventry, human triangles in deep-water brine, with a gash along the prow signifying something something, Eve spanning, Adam on the delve, and the barrow boy who lost a finger pointing at Andromeda, his claim to be Picasso’s mentor put to the iron, ye olde this-ness a meter of inaccuracy... It’s like that, back on the farm.

We soothe such febrile matters, the colic babe or madman’s former lover, who held one day he just sat down when his blood expanded.

Like a rat gnawing a wire or badger cornered by the fishwife’s unseemly ire.

Spahr-Summers

crow

Talent Show Auditions

Next is a comedian

Who simply stands there sobbing. A stagehand leads him away.

Then, a juggler of the invisible.

Either a con, or utter genius.

A singer only dogs can hear.

A magician, minus any magic.

The mute thespian, His monologue of clicks and whistles. We thank him for coming.

Lastly, after a trying day, A woman who only glares at us,

her anger palpable, our personal lives in disarray. All kinds of trouble brewing. McRae - 37

Famous Insomniacs

Madonna can’t sleep because she’s afraid we’ll discover she’s a fraud and she’ll have to move back to Bay City, Michigan, take bubble baths in the tainted and toxic Flint drinking water.

Marilyn Monroe couldn’t sleep because her dreams were weighed down with premonitions of her early death, conspiracy theories and visions of Madonna desecrating her image in music videos.

A Pacifist at the Chessboard

It’s a game first. Even she knows that. But it’s war and her soul recoils. Still, she hovers over, first, a spare pawn, then that stolid rook ready to slide quick, down a file. But she stops, muttering

a quick act of contrition. then picks her sharpest weapon: She sends the queen’s bishop to slay with faith.

moon Mitchell – 40 – Spahr-Summers

Marie C. Lecrivain

The Mockingbird and Minotaur

Today is low-fi jazz along with coffee the staccato sounds of drills into sheet metal while the mockingbird fucks its mate in the pomegranate tree a car door slams as anger is suppressed by the owner who drags her feet in cheap nine wests to the back door of a post-production sweatshop

clouds drift overhead my stomach gurgles an alarm clock

I choose to ignore as I slowly savor the bittersweet coffee that hits the back of my tongue on a retrograde Wednesday my morning concert will soon be interrupted by the skinny minotaur who’ll sob when he discovers dawn eluded his clumsy grasp from the kitchen window

I watch the mockingbird

hop to another branch as he surveys his kingdom of leaf and concrete surprised he’s not smoking a cigar

pink tree blues

Lecrivain – 43 – Spahr-Summers

Why David Carradine

Was a Karmic Masochist

You can first spot it in the film Boxcar Bertha; that moment, as Union Bob, when he’s crucified to the door of the train, his piercing screams bordered on ecstasy. In every episode of Kung Fu, he’s tied up (and down), put in cuffs and chains, and hung from the rafters like a Thanksgiving turkey in a farmer’s barn.

It was in the way he held himself close, like a wonderful, terrible secret. It was written in the marks on his neck when police found him bound to a travel hanger in a hotel closet, his pupils black, blind, and stilled from the final satiation la grande mort brings. (Previously appeared in Lummox Annual #9 (c) 2018, Lummox Press)

The Emperor (IV)

Mars is old, rusty, and cold. You can feel it when you try to unclench fingers that cradle the orb and the scepter, but are unable to do so. Arthur had the same problem, and there’s no Parsifal to blow warm breath on your frozen limbs, to unleash you from the boundaries you set for us, and yourself.

You see your consort, atop a faraway hill. She’s not paying attention. She has her own concerns. You worry about her but have never said so. Boundaries - again. Where is love in conjunction with the law?

The 1002nd Arabian Night

There’s only so many ways to tell the same story before the Sultan nods off or starts checking eMecca for the newest virgins on the block.

There’s only so many nights a storyteller can stand before she gags from the foul stench of the Sultan’s hummus farts and noon shadow that’s not been attended to for more than a fortnight.

Love is the ability to listen to the same story over

and over and over again, until the bile and boredom no longer burn a hole in your bowels. If the one you love is still by your side after “happily ever after” has become an epithet, you can both move into the comfortable twilight of companionshipand hope you’ll die first.

(Previously published in Heroin Love Songs (© 2020, Spring)

What’s Your Sign?

When someone asks me “What's your sign?”

I want to be flippant and say Slippery When Wet. But that’s not me, and I don’t want to answer in pictograms or heart shaped hands.

But if you insist, I’ll tell you, one night, most likely in December, when L.A. skies are clear, and it’s quiet, and cold. I’ll set up my telescope, point it at the Crab Nebula and say, “Here you go,”

and wait for you to either stare into the history of a thousand and one years, or swing the telescope across the cosmos to find yourself out there.

Lecrivain - 51

Abigail Elizabeth Ottley

The Starveling Magpie

I grew in the dark, my heartbeat a blip, heard my new blood roar. A tiny river hurrying by is swelled to to a torrent by much rain. My snug wall broke to knives of new light and bones leaped to sing my beginning. Eye light now, bright as a bomb, a terrible flapping of wings. I am no songbird. I am one made for sorrow. My curved beak is raucous and bleak. I am a tree-top chatterer of gobbets of nonsense. I read well your expression as you pass. Your path bisects the arc of my too awkward flight. Like a tame thing I come to you for titbits. I am pecked at. I wear my black feathers askew and, with one crooked leg, I am put upon. I am not sleek, no fine cock-of-the walk, not glossy, not fledged.

Ottley - 52

Brice Maiurro

Traffic

I took all of the televisions in my house, all the laptops, old cell phones, speakers, record players and I hit play on it all, everything.

Each thing a different sound, a different image, Janis Joplin crashing over nature videos pin balling Alan Watts intersecting Flying Lotus swarming Amadeus blasting infomercials colliding Radiohead all coming together in an original moment of chaos, of traffic.

I figured I’d been distilled, left unable to be impressed upon. Like an abstract painting staring exhausted across the hall at another abstract painting, but I still didn’t cry, or scream, or smile, or feel much at all.

The power blew, and every sparking light inside went out, it was only then, in the absence of all of the electricity that the river came.

Maiurro – 54 – Spahr-Summers

apples

Unbirthday

I want it to rain for seven thousand years. I want to swim through it all. I want us to collectively forget all of these things that we seem to be so certain are worth remembering. Let’s create entire cities made of glass and leave the stones in the rivers, take off our shoes at the door,

set no alarms. I want to wear a dress on my birthday. I want to wear a dress on my unbirthday, my death day, on gray days and purple days, where the staircases stop working. I want to brush my teeth with my left hand and never apologize when I’ve got this huge storage unit packed to the brim with Thank You’s.

I wanna forget how to write a poem. I want to remember what it feels like to be the life of the party, to smoke illegal weed and watch cartoons all Sunday. I want to put my wet lips to the flaps of a balloon and blow and blow and blow until that thing pops like Personal Independence Day.

I want to make out to Fall Out Boy in the back of a ’95 Civic again.

I want to sting a mosquito with all of my blasphemy and all of my fuego and say Haha! See! How do you like it?

I want to ride Lucas’ bike drunk again in suburban circles against the wind in the only place I’ve ever been where time totally stopped. I wanna climb that mountain again with you

this time high on conviction and communication and sobriety. I want to take the heart down with us. I want to yell love! into a megaphone that echoes in a chorus of protest against walls made of people. I want riot gear to mean we’re naked.

I want someone to remember Me, to love Me, to pay attention to Me. (I really don’t think I want to be on Television. Seems to be where people go when they have no other choice.)

I don’t need to know everything. I don’t want to. I want to write better poems even if I have to write lifetimes of terrible poems. I wanna get caught again by the cops

when we’re kissing in the rain. I want to shake out just how romantic I am. I want to be so cool. I want for you to know you can feel what you feel and I want to stop them from stopping you.

Touchdown Lakers. Maiurro – 61

When I look in the mirror:

We are brothers smug with a sworn secret. We are jackals howling laughter. The trickster winks and I do not. We ask how old have we allowed ourselves to become?

We try to see ourselves as if in a pool of water. We decide how we will carve our face tomorrow.

We see the shadow of our father. We wonder when we will die. We gaze away and wash our hands of the whole experience, but we remain in the blurry frame of uncertain proof and tangible wonder. We rise back into this ceremony of moment. We count our teeth, so far still there.

We become so still we consider exactly where we’ve become. We attempt to weigh our soul, a practiced act of distraction. We forget to turn off the cold water. There’s no clock on the wall behind us. We turn off the tap and we say let’s do this again sometime soon. We have this secret language, you see, that no hounds, no light, no best intention of empathy will ever find.

Mauirro

Motivation

1pm in the morning, I roll over in bed to see the poster of the man climbing the mountain. “The world is waiting for you,” it says to me. I sigh, throw on some pants, unlock my door, and step outside. A woman is in the street, banging on a car, honking and honking, “you’re in my way!”

she yells, before pulling her pants down to her ankles and pissing on the hood of the car. I turn around, back inside and lock my door. Today the world can wait a little longer.

the crying tree

Michael Brockley

Love Poem to Il Mare

I have rented the house on stilts by the sea for the past year. The stone at the base of the walkway reads Il Mare, but there is no address on the bronze mailbox beside the road. Every night it snows enough to lure me into reveries of imaginary serenades and aubades, but the light cover melts by midmorning. In the afternoon, I ride my bicycle along the sea road into town where I visit a second-hand book store. Or else walk along the beach with the Shih Tzu that lives in the house. I teach myself to cook the simple fare I eat. Casseroles, a thin chowder. Winter salads. The walls play songs to fit my mood before I can identify a title. Daybreak and Fireflies. Greensleeves. While I read the love poets I once spurned, the dog I call Cola sleeps at my feet. As evening spills into night, I sample the pinot noirs from the well-stocked wine cabinet. And gaze at unfamiliar constellations as shooting stars disappear. All while snow settles on my eyes. At nightfall I leave a photograph of the dead tree from the front yard in the mailbox for the tenants who will follow me. Or for one of those who dwelt here before my time. A photograph of the tree with gold Christmas lights strung throughout its bare branches. Maybe you have seen me on a bench at the subway station. Or passed me in the used book store where I sought Let’s Not Forget Loving the Rainbow without success. I often dress in black. I am a rough and tousled man.

- 68

Brockley

La Ville-Lumière

(from Midnight in Paris (2011), Woody Allen)

I wait for extinct cars on the midnight steps of a church in Paris. When the revelers invite me into their Packard, I am Hemingway. Dalí. A rhinoceros. Gertrude Stein is reading my novel in which I have abandoned Hollywood plots to a parade of blondes. To prigs who specialize in counting the pimples on bastard kings. There is a shopkeeper who walks in the rain. I greet her on a bridge as the city lights wink around us. A woman who sells the diaries of loves that never were. The most beautiful women long for the dance de la fin siècle. To be seduced by the most ancient of wines.

Aloha Shirt Man’s Nativity Night beneath the Christmas Star

Summoned by his fragile angels, Aloha Shirt Man left A Wish for Wings That Work unwatched. And gathered together the gifts a man unfamiliar with children might choose to deliver to a child born beneath the conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn. So Aloha placed in a paper bag a Bob Dylan poetry anthology, a Pete Rose World Series MVP card, and a royal blue necktie showing Wile E. Coyote strumming a guitar center stage under a spotlight. A shadow of the Roadrunner poised at the bottom of the scene. Following Siri’s GPS directions, Aloha steered his car through the star-lit streets of Muncie until the guide stopped him at the blockhouse by the railroad depot where the woman with a split black-heart necklace once lived. Behind the apartments he found a shed heated by a small fire with a young mother inside rocking a baby girl swaddled in bright Kente cloths. A wicker bassinet on the dirt floor between them. The mother relaxed in her Carhartt jacket as Aloha laid his gifts before her. His trickster tokens: Jokerman, Rogue and Fool. And while Aloha knotted the necktie into a bow at the foot of the makeshift manger, Wile E. began picking the six-string until the coyotes of Muncie paused at their nocturnal prowl to howl a hymn that might have passed for “Adeste Fidelis” to Aloha’s mangled ears. The woman thumbed for a moment through the Dylan poetry tribute with its dog-gnawed spine until she marked a place with the foxed baseball card and turned aside to nurse her daughter. As she fed the baby, she hummed carols Aloha almost recognized. “Go Tell It on the Mountain.” “Navidad de los Pobres.” Throughout the night of the Christmas star, he kept vigil with the family, ensconced in a Rural King concert chair he used to relax in at Bean Blossom bluegrass shows.

In the shelter he greeted the neighborhood children when they brought bags of peanut-butter-flavored cereal and basketball jerseys with 23 stitched across the front or the back to tuck around the sleeping infant. Until Aloha himself succumbed to the solitude he has always slept with. When he awoke, he found himself in an empty toolshed, his lips chapped and face chilled. A warm guitar pick in his left hand. Venite, adoremus, dominum fading at the verge of what was left for him to hear. And a baggie with three Mexican wedding cakes, his favorite cookie, on the ground beneath his chair.

Brockley - 71

The Table

of

Misfit School Psychologists

We swivel-hip past the occupied seats until we arrive at a round table at the Fall Conference. Usually we’re near the speaker’s dais because my muffled ears refuse any voice pitched higher than the basso profondo of James Earl Jones. Julie from a town of utopian mazes waves beside Max in his madras shirt. Jackie takes the last seat. Once I wore Repp neckties to these lunches, with Pinky and the Brain cascading down a navy silk fabric. Now my colleagues recognize me by my Headless Horseman Aloha shirt. By my Tommy Bahama St. Nicholas on a surf board. Jackie named our motley troupe, “The table of misfit school psychologists.” We are the solitaires who wander from table to table in search of an empty chair. The lone wolves who’ve eaten too many servings of conference lasagna at a table for one. Max blackens his salad and roast chicken with pepper. Lauren, an intern, jokes about diving off the bell curve’s 99th percentile, and Julie critiques the mood pens in our swag bags. I ask about the watered-down criteria for dyslexia. Swap a wedge of German chocolate cake for a slice of Amish apple pie. Most of us hope Billie Bob Thornton will elude the police with his teddy-bear gift at the end of his Bad Santa crime spree again this December. Every year we introduce ourselves to each other. Every year we fidget with our fables until we fit in again.

Brockley - 72

Barnett – 73 – Spahr-Summers

J. B. Mulligan

the house of man i the house of man the centering island a bird of fable with four glittered wings flags and antennae bristle above hospitals and houses drug stores and dry cleaners the beast is alive alert the gargoyles poised and posed the pigeons plump and juicy the feast prepared Mulligan - 74

every dish is found here carefully positioned under sacrificial candles by obsequious waiters or slaughtered in a kitchen high above Despair Street herds of the hungry gather in the schoolyards on subways in Fifth Avenue stores a coat of many colors on a craze-dancing child or a patchwork bathrobe on Old Man Second Story Window who looks upon the streets he danced crazily across when the moon was so young it had just begun to spin

the house of us one shore when the world is broken sea erupting rocks and waves and the fish and the fishermen are brief silver hoverings that mesh a tangle the boat atop Mount Ararat that holds Mount Ararat as mirrors swallow mirrors and fish bellow fish in and out out and in in a fishbowl lit and hung on a street lamp

at the corner of Mobius and Escher iii the house of woman where crossing a street is turning a page to a different book the language of each building the vowels of windows the consonants of fire escapes water towers the hidden meanings of steel beams and elevators the gasping in and out out and in of people hunched over hurrying living fast-forward

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no two words in the same language thank vous viel with a Japanese nod or the finger-salute held high as a harbor statue Hey and the word emerges from an alley whiskered as a rat with a rat’s fur carpeting the cheeks or saunters out a golden door leading a scented poodle dyed blue and beribboned and rat-faced

iv everything painted cars buildings people feathers of the bird fitted together soaring against the moon that hangs over the Hudson like a street lamp swirling with fish and smiles v in the house of all doors and windows open and shut a body of mouths a constellation of burning eyes and the black holes at the edge of the light

faces wander like pollen faces shine and crumple like the history of petals apparitions the city rises people get on and off the city rushes people get off and on all the mirrors pass in a somber dance though each is humming a different song vi the house of woman draws the ermine of night

across its high plump breasts douses itself in juicy pearls diamonds Christmas tree lights and celebrates today will be tomorrow tonight will be for love and song and work and death and laughter all members of the family sitting at the table ready to agree to argue so the hell with it let’s dance crazy this way or that or both in either order there is always music somewhere

vii a traffic jam of carts and pavilions the street fairs parades of nations histories with drums trumpets and floats an endless walk around like a wedding band on the finger of the world farmer’s gate warrior’s gate children’s gate in and out out and in

the world comes dancing and never stops viii noise if by day light if by night revolution here the flags are hung like nametags at a convention the countries and the cities totter down Forty-Second Street wide-eyed with cameras the clock rings in New Year’s hour after hour like a faucet dripping days in the house of all

ix blood pulses from body to wing to body breathing like a hive in and out out and in pollen music the garden morphs into a flower in Central Park and the stems run like streets like maps of subway lines every stop is on the corner where the house of man erects itself rises straightens its spine flaps its four wings

and launches into sun and moon x in the fat old museum at half-past who-knows-when the stubby tour guide cheerfully recites: this is the door to the house of us this is where we are going this is where we live the museum is on the second floor

Old Hands

Chopping dill. Rinse under water, lash the air above the sink, then cut the stems and put aside, then cut the rest in half, then put the top half on the bottom, and chop finely, crosswise then lengthwise, and wipe the blade of the knife (waste not, want not: children of privilege wrung from Depression and war, and living now in similar times, though not as starkly deprived, but remembering what we learned from those who knew).

Her sister cuts up chicken breasts, stirs them in (I think) olive oil, then ladles over them jerk sauce, and stirs again. Some of this

will be for us (for charity begins at home), and the rest will go to a neighbor’s church tomorrow for the homeless to feast among their temporary family.

“She couldn’t make it. Her water heater sprang a leak and she had to go back home.” (Home is where the leak is, and the heart, younger then, unclogged, or absent the stents and bypasses, the slings and arrows of outrageous aging – and among those elder hearts that wondered how much longer long would last – and it didn’t, as our long will stop lasting, too.)

Two sisters, as their mother and mine were, and some of the third sister’s children are on the way, or on the way back home

to curse out the heater. My sister is out on Nantucket, in a summer that was her last, until the biopsy came back negative – and may still be, will be, some summer much closer than those summers at the Hotel.

“I remember dancing lessons.”

“The Box Step.” “Yes, the Box Step.”

The Heat Index is a threat to those our age, more so than the claws of the asphalt on young feet crossing the street to go to the beach, or the soda shop.

“The place where they sold cookies.”

“And Turkish Taffy.” “Yes, Turkish Taffy.”

Memories unpacked in a new brief house of us all, like so many houses back then, our parents’ houses and Granddaddy’s house,

and dusted off, examined, placed here or there on the broad heavy table of the past.

“It’s the Persian way of cooking rice,” my cousin says, who travels there, studies there, preserves the dusty shards of long-forgotten families unrelated to us except in pain and joy and death.

Parboil the rice, swirling the water pasty as her arms and face, old hands slashing through like fish, then drain.

Put aside some of the rice. Mix in seasonal vegetables (peas in this case) and the dill.

Oil the bottom of a pot. Slice a potato thinly and layer on the bottom of the pot, along with the reserved rice. Spoon over that the rice mixture.

Poke wells in the rice “for the steam.”

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Heat until the outside of the pot stings an index finger touching it briefly. Pour in a small amount of water lower heat and steam for an hour.

Old hands, pale and thick-fingered, an artist’s hands when younger, and now hands that lift the evidence of the ages and put it on a higher, safer shelf, and poke wells in mounded rice with a wooden spoon. “There. Done.”

“Why did you wrap the pot cover in a towel?” “It absorbs moisture so the rice doesn’t get soggy.”

I cook with a microwave, although I press the buttons like a seasoned pro. Cousins arrive with beer and baklava, antipasto and bread and wine, Mulligan - 90

and wide arms with skin that sags like a white towel on an oven door handle.

Hugs and kisses and cursing the heat.

Out to the grill the chicken goes. Out to the garden in the back yard the cousins go, with nibbles and liquor and tales of work and children grown from children now hidden in puffed, exhausted costumes, with familiar shifted faces. Apparently, we all work with assholes. (If you can’t say something nice, you could fit in with my family.)

The day gets hotter. The chicken gets grilled, as does the cook. The rice is finished with a portion taken to soak in saffron-steeped hot water, then scattered on the top of the mound of rice Mulligan - 91

surrounded with crisped potato slices.

The absent are spoken about, of course, at least briefly. The homeless cousin.

The cousin who drifted away, a moon lost in the dark sky of a city this big and its surrounding towns. The cousin who keeps in touch with one other cousin.

The word-knives that were sometimes there when we were younger, have been cast away or broken, or they’ve simply been surrendered because we were cut enough ourselves and (shockingly) outgrew them.

Old hands have put them away.

The dead are talked about more. They weigh more. The mass and density of personal history anchor and sink us, or keep us afloat and a-cling to the wreckage of time.

“She was a fox when she was young.”

“They all were.” And the young men gathered and knew the worth of them, and were not (too often) assholes, and so they married and begat and we listened to them partying from the Children’s Table Conspiracy out in the hall. “We broke so many things. Nice things. Why didn’t they kill us?”

Leapings from bureau to bed. Water balloons on passers who would interrupt the party to complain for some reason. And still,

“They never killed us. Not even once.”

And bits of biography melt into the air still as hot as a schoolboy’s ass when a nun caught him cheating.

How we turned into us from the faces we remembered. Operations. Moves around the map. Marriages that shouldn’t have died and marriages that happened accidentally the way a board will float by at sea, or a floating door that opens onto a ship that appears from the widest nowhere beyond the blue horizon.

The living are talked about often, how we held them and keep them, how they floated away into darkness.

Jerk chicken and Persian rice are spooned onto plates and two rooms are filled with delight and conversation.

Opinionated voices carry above the rest, inflated.

I try to do my part.

More memories are passed like salt, and the evening fades, more quickly that memory can when it wants to stay, clings with the scent of saffron and dill or the smoke from a long-ago fire.

People begin to hug and depart.

“Next year at my house. We have a pool.”

“Next year at your house. Yes.”

The neighbor stops by from church to thank my cousin – and her husband brings more beer, just in case. He’s never met us – a happy guess, perhaps.

More stories, more jokes, more admissions of love. More appearances by the dead, who got out more often when alive, but not by as much as you’d think.

The brother of the three sisters who started this glorious mess, who was Granddaddy’s chauffeur, who took my cousin once when he was seven, to get gas across from Ebbets Field, and when a boy at the station lunged across the hood of the car to keep a baseball from shattering the windshield, got out from behind the wheel, and sternly and silently pointed at the smudge on the hood left by the boy’s desperate .

What could you say?

“That was our Uncle.”

A man alive in a story who told his stories once, heard stories of those before, a chain going down into shadows to an anchor in the murk and muck and graveyard of lost bones, of dice rolled by hands of flesh and work dirt, old hands like all of us now, who totter off to bed, or sit alone in the kitchen, speaking to ghosts, and nibbling at chicken.

The ghosts never answer, but they don’t point their fingers and sometimes, that’s enough. We know what they might say if they could speak.

camillia

Firewalking

the truth will never set fire to itself it's embers will never burn our feet but the ash from the coals will always wander in circles until the spiral is complete

A Poem on the Attack on Salman Rushdie

:: On Curtain Calls & Candle Lights

candles are neither snuffed / nor silenced / in gatherings of many / but lit & lifted / the independently minded / heat wax & wax poetic / memories meander then mingle / all moments monitored / each drop of wax a pulse / moderated, not dominated / the literary-minded seek & seize light / the language of writers / the candle more unifier than unit / its light both a reminder and a reason / candles are never truly extinguished / neither in a summer heat / nor a winter wind / darkness cycles with the moon / all moons worthy / as the moon orbits the earth / the earth orbits the sun / the candle a breath … a speck … a plight / of dust / in winds that wander

light and language linger in layers / of both seasons and scents / vanilla, chamomile, verse / eyes (and ties) to freedom / fiercely focused / even as darkness blankets stages / curtains heavy of

velvet and violence / knives and knowing / discontent on display / rips and tears of pages both paper and limb / tree rings signify age / the candle sometimes more salve than shadow / more license than light source / salvation sourced in layers of language and longing / all the worlds a stage / the candle provides more than light / more than (in)sight / the candle a sign and a signal / a wick heavy of wonder and wanderlust / also a reminder … that darkness remains for without the light of the candle / how might one distinguish (if not extinguish) the threat of darkness / candles are never truly snuffed / their wax lingers / in layers c(r)ouched of asymmetrical calls and irregular beats / all hearts broken / the candle must never be truly snuffed / nor its fight / consume not the candle … but its light as freedom of speech/thought/idea/expression fosters then fuels (near final) acts (& cruel facts) on stage – curtain calls & candles yield light

a collection of august recollections :: in four-wheel drive

woman in wheelchair wraps bruised arms around torso attendant pushes the woman in the wheelchair (all wheels well-oiled) sits with an easy air (despite the room’s unforgiving stares). her cheeks are rosy (also oiled). her posture (a braid of spine and spunk) relaxed. her hair is lightly scented of vanilla. she wears polyester slacks in a soft gray hue. her head bobs. her feet - both sole and arch – are well supported. she wears white sneakers, laces in double knots. all pulse points are sweet of lavender spray. both of her arms are heavily bruised. an attendant, decades younger, pushes the chair -- breaks (both motor and time clocks) checked and ready. the woman has nothing to hide. her lips are painted a deep red – natural pigment. small bits of dribble linger in her mouth’s creases – also natural. her hearing is compromised, her voice booms as compensation. i consume as i wait and watch a life well-lived, on full display and eager for dissection. over coffee. in waiting rooms. down sterilized hallways. ready. set. go. she can no longer recall her husband’s middle (or first) name (august), but she knows his birthday (day / month – also august / year). she can no longer recall how to compute tax on groceries, but she knows how many days it’s been since august passed (and how much he’d

allocate for weekly groceries). she no longer recalls the names of the flowers in her garden (mostly pansies and poinsettias), but she remembers the moment the honeybee kissed the daisy then stung august’s right pinky. she can no longer recall the year she and august pitched a tent and slept under the stars on delaware beaches, but she remembers (with a mix of glee and gloat) the gull that tried (but failed) to secure a french-fry from august’s cup. she no longer recalls the recipe (her great- grandmothers) she’d follow to make chicken soup (six carrots, three stalks of celery, one onion) but she remembers the day (a saturday, at the local flea market) august bought the cast iron pot (16-quart, sky blue) she’d use to make the stock. she can no longer recall what her children wore on the first day of school each fall (always a block of plaid), but she remembers buying the backpacks (always a solid canvas) they’d wear (stuffed with fresh pens, pencils, notebooks, and pinky balls). she no longer recalls how to get to the market, or which aisle houses the frozen confectionaries, but she knows the price of sherbet (and that it differs by up to a dollar in winter and summer). she can no longer recall the names of any cast members, but she remembers wearing an undersized snickers t-shirt for a rendition of candy man. she no longer recalls the first names of her five children (charlotte, nathan, penelope, pamela, phyllis), but she knows in which months they were born (march, april, november, december, january) and can also recite the full name of each character in days of our lives. Schneider - 103

she can no longer recall the names of the three branches of the military, but she recalls when august signed with the navy, knowing he couldn’t swim. she no longer recalls the day august passed (a monday, just after dark), but she remembers how he took his evening tea (two drops of honey) and his morning toast (two slices, two pats of butter) she can no longer recall the pain of childbirth, surgeries, or wisdom teeth, but she knows there is sometimes wisdom in forgetting. she can remember the christmas she gifted imaginiff, a board game in an oversized glossy square box, to each grandchild under eight (four of them), but she can no longer remember the smell/flavor/scent of what it means to imagine. she can no longer recall the color of the carpet in her childhood bedroom (lemonade yellow) but she remembers the night a spider crawled on her wall (its shadow danced with darkness). she screamed, but no one heard her. charlotte, she says, is that you? no one answers. august? she remembers august summers / greased then grilled over an open fire, heavy of sugar

- lemon meringue tart, gooey marshmallow and spice – charcoal, cinnamon, cumin / all flames - natural, solar, high school sweetheart lit / also barefoot. sticks and stones stocked then stacked / souls in rubber soles flip then flop / flounder, sometimes trout on fishhooks / guppies (and donuts) by the dozen gulp air as fireflies dance in honeysuckle brush (all cheeks blush) and daffodil crush at dusk / backs burnt of sun & sun – belly up – she remembers august as the woman babbles, i listen. we all do. suddenly, the overhead speakers buzz. an automated voice reminds all visitors to cover when coughing. the woman in the wheelchair startles. august is waiting. i can’t be late.

on hunger pains & kitchen mines vines

i’ve seen back to the future, parts I, II, even III, at least three, perhaps four, even five times but the only scenes i can remember are the ones where marty sits at his (or his mother’s) (or his future great grandfather’s) childhood home (time always relative) and the dining table is full of foods & spirits. spirit animals trade barbs and tortoise shaped glasses trade visions. glass pitchers of full fat milk brush shoulders with bowls of under seasoned soups. platters of potatoes (both yellow & green) –always mashed, meats (both tender & firm) – always creamed, grains – always frosted play ball (both fast & slow, with plenty of curves) while pitchers of water with no ice & juice with no sugar relievers with no rank clink and clank. cannisters of vodka wait (& watch) for opportunity & steals as spectators with front row seats. lorraine baines serves sheets of cakes (buttercream frosting) caked recollections (artificial sweeteners) amidst ceramic spheres of buttered round rolls & blocks of square meat, while george mcfly gawks and gaggles over crosswords with no answers & game show funnies with no winners. suspenders hold both imagination & ire at bay. time both relative and relentless. always on repeat. clocks both alarmingly abstract & always in absentia. bud lights, diet cokes, & butter knives make rounds both generational & generating. lorraine baines serves – on repeat the daily special. Perhaps quiche lorraine. perhaps cheese fontaine. all with a side of judgment (served over easy) & love in its time warped, over processed form. and despite hours of footage, i think of these twenty second times three scenes as i sit in my adult kitchen, and my chipped counter tops are full of foods both friend & foe and under processed judgment both jovial & jarring. and i watch batters of love pour, then unfold

in their no artificial sweeteners added form. in spaces where vanilla rum mixes naturally with raspberry truffles & corned beef hash sleeps soundly with spicy mustard seeds. and he, dressed in a faded grey pullover, the one with the small hole at the collar and the slight fray at the hem, and denim, also faded & frayed of hems & grass stains at knees, juggles seven, perhaps, eight pots of foods prepared. for me. not some future love or some past adoration. i well & swell, riding waves of unknown origin, not unlike lorraine baines as George McFly gaggles & gawks over television replays. and not unlike marty, in back to the future I, II, and III as he gulps fear that both descends and detains. fear of both known and unknown realities. of past, present, future. i gulp fear in forms of time machine trappings & foreign dimensions & for different reasons. as i know i/we can never come back to this moment & i want to stop time and seize time & consume all that he has prepared & savor him and freeze all ounces of the chicken tikka masala & all twenty-five, twenty-six, twenty-seven (counting, not counting) of the turkey meatballs -- now packed and placed in a tupperware. reliable & true. sturdy & secure. a tupperware that has weathered both storm and main. gifted on an engagement twenty-five, twenty-six, twenty-seven (counting, not counting) years prior. and toasted pumpkin seeds in a plastic bowl purchased twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two (counting, not counting) years earlier. and time for i worry my hunger, insatiable as it is, will consume all. the butter nut squash soup in its oversized pot, seasoned of at least nine spices. none of which can I name

as the dogs, whose breeds i cannot name, of at least nine years a piece lick the tile & the toasted seeds, some slightly charred in their undersized bowl, that I shovel into my mouth not once stopping to count or consider what lies within their shells for their exterior – toasted, crunchy, damp, & warm like a bed of fall leaves, in hues of cranberry, mandarin, and lemonade beckon & the homemade chocolate chip cookies melt, and I want to chill/freeze all of everything & time as I fear I will consume them all & him and that then there will be nothing left to consume and time will run out. the timer on the over door forever blinking a series of nines, or is it sixes, in spaces & places where time turns on its head and i think of my awkward self on the high school dance floor, tiled of crepe paper streamers & creche piled straws (& stews)

at not the enchantment under the sea dance, but the disenchantment by the sea prance, a sea of fish with no princes always out of water, as the tables (& charades) collapse & the music – johnny b. goode & other berry’s continue to play i’m back at the blueberry gingham covered formica table, in a the faux-wood lined kitchen (of mothers never mine) with raspberry paper and lemon berry shades, & plastic wrapped puffer seats, both over-processed & under nourished, my eyes framed of oversized tortoise rim, my torso of undersized tartan trims. where i sat & feared

i’d both never escape & never know love and i want to go back to the future & tell myself you will love, you will live, you will consume and not only will you love you will love so hard you will fear you know love too well & that there is no way to preserve this time, like raspberry jam in the cellar cupboard

& bub lights on tables of mcflys, baines & vodka in cannisters that courses through veins & that the future & the past could never be as ripe or as sweet as the present & it hurts so bad as the crushed cherry glaze & the milk chocolate chips melt on your tongue and you can taste the sweetness as he continues to prepare a feast of (your) favorite fare in the messy kitchen (yours) with the overhead light that blinks (always off tune), and the stove hood that creaks (too loud), that is your life

your / a present & i long simultaneously to go back to the future & to the past, but mostly to preserve, in airtight cans (whether tuna or time), the present. for as long as the future (back too) might be.

Rumbles and Rambles :: On Worms, Altitudes, and Overtly Lost Time

It’s the time of year when cardboard boxes (and fresh water) are in high demand. Temptation (conspicuous consumption amidst back-to-school sales) and temperatures (climate change and cross-coast moves amidst irreconcilable tempers and tempos) on the rise. College-bound teens look west (and east) (all compasses spinning) for expansion. Worms wriggle south (and north) (all segments twisting) to avoid extinction. A small earthworm travels her bedroom windows outside sill. We had probably caused it to stir. Having just finished a rumble through the attic for old packing containers. There, too, we displaced a family of worms. Habits and habitats hard to resist. While the worms (above and on the outer sill) wriggle, we pack her room in boxes. All corners – tee shirts, quilts, and cotton totes – tucked. We fill milk crates with embroidered hoodies and tie dye tanks. Each layer scented of newborn memories and Claire’s three for ten musk. Numbers embroidered on backs blur. My eyes blink and time warps. Years wrapped in (and of) segments of time – newborn to toddler. Then elementary, just across the divide. Middle and high school shared similar plots. All memories mixed, like homemade cookie batter (not worth). I shrink and shrug. Time inverted. All cartons stocked. Shampoos and conditioners (Pantene & Suave) in a plastic bin. Vanilla and lavender scents linger. Sweaters both striped & solid (some more stretched than others) woven of cotton candy and rainbow fibers. Softly stacked in an

antique tin. All photos labeled in shoeboxes. All sizes (and styles) out of both vogue and recent spins. Matte and glossy finishes reveal summer swims (rotating pieces) and high school proms (rotating gents on arms). A duo with Springsteen tickets and a hand-sketched heart on back. I tuck a wallet size in my waist pack. Pastel-colored folders are filled, then filed. Bio on Mondays and Wednesdays. Calculus at dawn. All paths finely calculated. With options to recalibrate for all spawn. She plans to study biology. Perhaps public health. Heath bars a perennial favorite. Make policy. Cure disease. I have no doubt she’ll do so. Determination is in her genes. As she dreams of dissecting taxons visions of tutus and lace dance the tango in my sleep. I wonder what she’d say if I told her not to blink. I’d tell her not to chase (or chastise) time. Not to deny it, either. Time (and its pulls) a tricky companion. More tells (and pushes) than testaments (and propositions).

Craved regardless of consumption. Peach fuzz and Pink Floyd both fungible. She promises to FaceTime often. Her scripts as compelling as sea-salt and oven-baked fries. I think of the sea gulls from summer evenings spent by the sea. Time both faced and fashioned (saltwater air and drawstring tears). Worms a constant target. Both sustenance and defeat. When I shut my eyes, she transformed. Amidst sand dust and unexpected thunderstorms. From a tiny toddler to a determined woman.

My stomach rumbles. I continue to fold then tuck denim (most frayed, some faded) in cotton totes. I don’t know what else to do. Friends say patterns regenerate. Segments restitched. Like time. And worms, I think. But what I read suggests they are at risk of becoming obsolete. For some worms, the more segments released, the less likely they are to be replaced. Nature both curious and confounding. I glance at my own limbs. Etched of time. It’s hard, I think, to release that which we know is exceptionally fine. I try to stitch tears and settle rough waters. Compress fabrics and fibers in plastic bins. Remove excess air. All eyes welled. The outside sill a front row seat to time’s theatre. Obsoleteness a primary concern. Overt gestures to push back time consistently overturned.

I’ve read that worms are a major food source. Moles badgers, hedgehogs, and foxes all need fuel. Aquatic animals also on the prowl. Fish, frogs, crayfish, and turtles take time to dine as well.

Friends suggest dinner (carefully planned, curiously choreographed in line with time) to distract. Her own tub of granola bars securely packed. Every meal I make reminds me that time continues to take. Chocolate chips cookies baked on Sundays. Turkey on rye a midweek lunch treat. Peanut butter and jelly on slices of Wonder. Her eyes would wander as she ate.

I sneak another glance at the window. The worm a few inches to the right of its prior spot. I always knew she’d inch forward. Eager to explore new trails. Never realized how much it might hurt. She’s no longer a little girl in pigtails. Now my limbs are locked. My eyes are closed. She soars and I inch. “Careful, Mom,” she calls. “Don’t let that closing door pinch.”

I’ve read worms eat diets rich in fruits and vegetables. Not unlike those she’d consume. Sliced peppers, chopped apples, diced pears. We made quite a pair. I’ll continue to make meals and memories. If not in real time. Afterall, it’s that time of year. The garden also hungry. New seeds are planted. New worms wired. She’s already pre-ordered Wifi. I close my eyes and imagine what the worm might see hear crave (supposing it could/would). Food, water, a comfortable place to sleep. Then, I imagine her new room while we pack. Ear worms ring of lullabies. Childhood favorites like Hush, Little Baby and Hey, Jude. Later, lyrics by Mellencamp, and Lennon. Even our songs retooled.

Now, we’re onto the shoes. The last box. All laces tied. “Wait, there’s one more thing,” she says, then grabs the Beanie Baby inch worm from the shelf nearby. It’s the plush she always prized. Won at an annual goldfish bowl toss. The summer fair. All skies painted a mix of pink and blue hues.

She places it in the box, the runs the tape across its top. Careful, Contents Fragile branded along its side. The worm twists. I inhale. “Here,” she says and extends her hand. A tissue flutters its wings in the room’s soft breeze. The window is now open a crack. Another worm has joined the stack. “I don’t want anyone to know we’ve both cried.”

A truck rumbles in the distance. It’s that time of year. Moves and movement in all corners of the universe. I exhale, then smile. Place an old compass toy in my right pocket. Everything will be fine.

Chiller

Once, when I was little I was suddenly big enough to babysit My brothers were still little So I could send them to bed when my parents were out

I was growing up, on a Friday night, late in October

When Kolchak: The Night Stalker was on TV Chasing monsters that no one else believed in Vampires and werewolves even something called a doppelganger

I was in charge

With a half-gallon of ice cream on the counter Brigham’s chocolate chip Frozen solid as the Arctic caveman from episode 13 Lawton - 118

Intrepid reporter Carl Kolchak tracking the creature all alone

Dedicated couch potato me on the living room couch all alone

The night all around us solid black

The house trembling and groaning Suddenly I didn’t know if there might be someone hiding in the basement

Who might try and sneak up on me

While I was watching Kolchak creep around in his speckled vanilla white suit There were fears living inside of me

The ice cream would start to get soft around the inside edges of the carton You could push the spoon in there wooden stake and silver bullet

Slide it around the frozen core to bring out the melted part Sweet, creamy and crystallated with chocolate bits that hold the cold

Like the cold holds me

There is nothing to be afraid of

But the cold holds me I’m supposed to be a big kid now

Yet the cold holds me Lawton - 119

Kolchak will survive the danger

even if he ends up in disgrace

I slip inside the space between the carton and the ice cream bone chill sarcophagus

To wait for my parents to come home.

Edith Keeler Must Die*

It’s a simple question of your love or the timeline. I mean, do you want Hitler to be president? Did you like space because we won’t see it again, your whole intergalactic sex future is about to disappear. This might be my human half talking, but for fuck’s sake Jim someday I get to make it with a foxy Ardanan don’t take that from me. I could have lived in a cloud city, been a magistrate, but you had to fall in love with the end of everything.

Before you destroy the multiverse can we at least exit the 1930’s? I don’t want to live out my days as a pointy-eared radio tech. Only death may pay for life, didn’t I hear that somewhere? Bones is sane again and he agrees. There Jim, it’s coming, headlights down the road. Do you see it? That’s fate driving a Buick Roadmaster. Any second now it’ll come careening over this curb like the tires of God to send us back to our century. Home, Jim. Replicators, holodecks, interstellar travel. Or Hitler apocalypse, your choice.

It’s here, there’s no time to waste. She’s running out the door to meet you.

Bite your tongue Jim, squeeze your fists, step out of the way, and look.

*Title is a Spock quote from s01 e28 of Star Trek TOS, “The City on the Edge of Forever,” written by Harlan Ellison.

Fischman – 122

Walk

We go up into the foothills thigh-deep in snow and t-shirts it’s 70 degrees today at 10,000 feet the young trees half-buried we shake the ice out of our sneakers scale the biggest rock. At the edge it’s a 60-foot drop we light up watch for elk and bears the mountains only get bigger from here the valley slopes down jagged but there are footholds. The rain is falling miles away blankets of feathers we’ve left the snow behind there’s scat on the ground hoof-prints in the dirt the boulders are temples to a cataclysm the eyes of white aspen watching. A cross for one who fell to kiss the earth for the last time we are two miles into the sun’s own bedchamber I take a long piss into the river do a Daniel San on one of the stones. The pine trees are rocket trails in the indelible blue sky I slip but a branch catches me “Thanks Mom” I say we burn down another joint in sacrifice worship the nearby peaks and if I could just explain one thing to you about Colorado it would be this

Love Letter from a City Street

after Frank O’Hara

You were walking or maybe you were running Times Square was at full volume the lights the cameras the future stars you passed a gaggle of horsed policemen looking as dazed as you felt sidewalk sparking like crushed gems you were lost in the maze of us pizza and indoor parking garages the newspapers all screaming about Life on Mars this was early 2000-and-something we were the beginnings of a cyborg nation space was no escape you turned west to face the falling sun and headed for the river sprinting now your breath a caged animal brownstones and slums and secret restaurants and somewhere around 10th avenue

it got quiet and the rain started to fall a light rain like dew collecting over the world and you sat on a wide stoop set down your burdens lit up a hidden joint and that’s when you found me

the bird museum Fischman – 126 – Spahr-Summers

Mistranslation of the Cascajal Block

I work the garden by windowlight. Harvest, plant. The stars overhead are sacks of vermin and dead birds. I forge, dig, cut. Square the spaces for seeds. I am a bent flower under the pandemonium of stars, wings howling in flocks above the house. Harvest, plant. Live another day. Water the vegetables with metal tears and the pillars will pierce the sky. I work until the stars spill their guts out to fertilize my garden. And my garden grows. It grows.

Mister Rogers Raymond Chandler Carver

Neighborhoods of employment

Neighborhoods of Army Training Neighborhoods of details for pay Neighborhoods of grief for free Official neighborhoods of Officials policed by opulent, sophisticated plain clothes coppers coming n going while the neighborhood watchers speak of anti-gang initiatives, just so Crafty, Arty, Gewgaw, Doodah neighborhoods Neighborhoods where they’re better than you if you’re me

maybe even better than you if you’re just you and shy a few millions, or the right melatonin or the right vocabulary or the proper dogma

Mister Rogers Raymond Chandler Carver neighborhoods And the police la la la are their friends and they all sit and watch day after tomorrow without the ittiest itch of irony Upstairs Downstairs-Downton’s Abbey together on the couch once they’ve turned off all the lights n locked all the jails and the Lions have laid down with and eaten all the Lambs and then: exterior shot of the house on a hill that looks like a planetarium

... or a barracks, or a jail... the camera pulls up, up, above, and away... and we see all the surrounding neighborhoods... and even further out we see the Kicks Instead of Kisses Neighborhood the Cops n small time Robbers neighborhoods, and their victims neighborhoods and then there’s a shot of the moon cause it’s round past midnight when the vampires n romantics come out to play and they’re all in love with it everybody whatever spell it’s casting tonight-today... all the bloody fucking/ preforming-presentational/ cinematic/ repressentin’ loony loons neighborhoods

Lost 6 to 3

Instantly, it seems fifty years can be forgotten. Who imagined the rights of women could be scattered and lost?

Lost, 6 to 3

I never met my Aunt Happy, my grandmother’s golden sister. But I have heard the stories about her kindness, her beauty. She had another name, a given name, But no one ever used it. She was called by how she made everyone feel, Happy. I wonder about her story when I rattle the skeletons in our family closet. How did Aunt Happy end up in the back street clinic?

Who helped her to get there and did they hear her screaming?

Did they rush her to the hospital?

Or was she kept at home to bleed to death silently –

All my grandmother would say was that we lost her.

Lost, 6 to 3

The secret abortion that went horribly wrong, Taking her life, stealing her happiness from usToday, we all shared in her tragedy again. Now all women risk being Lost.

Shoe beneath the Stairs

Time itself must have loosened the tread, years of enough foot traffic hitting just the right spot for that rusty nail’s pop pinging down the rest of the steps to that old damp farmhouse cellar.

Lo & behold but a child’s shoe is folded & tucked in that revealed chamber where the wood has swung off.

Circa early 19th century, it’s a worn leather button-up, the sort which took a hook to fasten tight round the ankle’s delicate width.

This superstitious burying has been linked to heritage far-flung as Brittany to East Anglia,

found in monasteries & churches, workhouses & manor, but with no empirical proof to explain what it’s all about.

Fertility, most guess, as in there was an old woman whose children spilled pell mell out of her house which was a boot. Other archeologists theorize of a spiritual midden protecting against the troublesome or more diabolical evil on the move though here these words coming as if via Ouija call forth the familial, name the shoe Aunt Anne’s taken too soon by scarlet fever at nineteen while her brother, my father, ran as a frozen howl, his grief matching the wild rose brambles tangling our farm’s plentiful back hills. Think of lake willows drinking the water deep under sandy mud to know the bottom of such sorrow catfish sweep with their whiskers, converting what ails to a nurturance only those living in such currents know. Are the tragedies of our days

just news fodder from Reality TV compared to an age where loss traveled by horse or mule? Oh saddlebag, oh satchel, your interiors were the dusk bringing ducks to shore as sure as that bible the heft of an elephant’s foot in which Aunt Anne’s flower drawings - graphite, pastelwere pressed to float forth before eyes & into hands white-gloved and magical as a shop of lamps, a home of lusters, the benevolent museum of the Past’s precious gas flues.

His Mind’s Inclined to Math

I’m beginning to understand he knows a sort of poetry my own mind rarely touches. What is it that eludes me Perhaps the room behind his gaze made entirely of windows numbers cover, numbers as elements & all they can do. Perhaps he finds shelter there, a way of reaching as my wants, curious, start flowing from these cogs. Also I suddenly see us as scribes in a house of membranes. We are so different & get to know poles as magnets. Then too there are the stony disagreements. Then too there are shadows, some; offerings, others; throngs with crosses, with bombs. Oh my friend, you whom I’ve often taken issue with, I am afraid of seeing brutality carved on your face in an open casket. But where is my hope?

Lead me to your fingers scribbling figures in little light, the dark digits, the shimmering hands I will take ‘til this fear forgets itself.

electra

Mead – 137 – Spahr-Summers

Precious Jade

From the rubble comes walls of growth, maybe moss or ivy, something thick, herbaceous over the peeling and charred. This is my secret place. Don’t cross it without knocking, wiping feet, expecting me to pretend there’s nobody in. While you stand there at the entrance, its wood all scarred, shadowed by battles, the legacy of our age, I’ll be considering tenderness despite the clear hard line taken, coming from an ethic of quiet doers, quiet bias with the husk, just partially, thrown off. Of course, if you were hurt, on the lam, would I think twice? I’d rather like a colony composed only of friends,

each more real for being a bit sad.

You see, they’ve earned comfort, have proved the superficial the sham that it is, lasers of pain looking through, suspicious but stronger, smarter, discriminating not by race, sexuality but truth for its pure tough knowledge. Well, perhaps you’re not up for that It’s alright. Understanding is a landscape, these little time pieces of patience making a jade valley though surprisingly quilt-soft and green with an outsider’s openness always glimpsed between cracks. There touch is a luxury of the utmost importance.

Cities

Here is the magnification of insects: earthworm tunnels, subways lurching, the bustling hive’s apartment complex, the merchant district ant farms.

Nature replicates nature, that grand industrious scale. Here being still means belonging to a particular genus and species. Hear the system breathing, functioning anonymously autonomous?

This overview glimpsed ticks on, off and on as a neon sign for the voice mail’s answering machine intimacy, the busy breath buzzing, the mating call drone.

White sound fibrous as Muzak filters, filters over us bugs, metal-encased, and rain-splashing wipers throughout traffic echoing the lives under windshields.

Bestiary Lessons

Beneath my sister’s bed at three in the morning, a baby rabbit’s screams shattered somnolence like fire. The cat dragged the thing in, proud, playful, unaware of being merciless. In my sister’s good hands that rabbit lay: hurt, quivering, while rage promoted tears, apologies in the face of the fatal. Despite all the world’s loving care, it took three days to die, at first cradled in a laundry basket, and then left beneath the shadow of an Oak. Nothing else could be done. Even the vets had surrendered.

Once, in Boston, I rescued an infant squirrel, shaking, afraid, beside the tire of a car about to pull out. A metropolitan crowd gathered, full of admonishment, warning. “Don’t touch, don’t.”

Yet, ashen fur, that animal hopped from my grasp, scampered through dandelions asserting yolk yellow. The crowd was amazed. Tonight, following a party with only a few guests left, topics turned solemn. Nazi Germany. Hiroshima, the acts regular nice citizens stood by without word or committed as if mass slaughter was unconditional.

How could people? Where is the meaning?

Look between the act and the fear and you come up with a stance personal as choosing whether to do something, anything, or look the other way.

color the fall Mead – 144 – Spahr-Summers

Tripping in the Sixties #2

I watched a bar of soap transform into an angel. I never felt so good as she licked my soul clean.

cluster Gentile – 145 - Spahr-Summers

Aphotic Fragment

And then there’s us, hunched forward at the writing desks of our washed-out lives. We, who understand that the world can be as cavernous as the komodo dragon’s throat. Whose bookshelf minds carry the words of dead poets. I want to sleep the sleep of apples.

We, who discover glory in a simple cup of black coffee or ruby red wine.

Whose raw eyes recognize beauty in failure.

Whose callous hands can’t help but compose the stanzas of our mournful hearts. Whose rhymes are accidental. Whose form appears natural. Whose meter is the improvised melody of a tragic soul.

We, whose verses are nothing but solemn confessions from the elbowed out space where light refuses to reach.

Barnett – 148 – Spahr-Summers

burnout the virtue

seductive suffocation amplified active harder harder motivation to push through the wait of eight hour days growing longer want infinity well too bad buck up & grind the industrial revolution has given up on gates now we spin the turbines in hell so we can afford our graves one day incumbent overstress of human genomics freelanced will of independent experience encourages external funding full time only part time need not apply we do not have time for you in this information age we indeed need your indentured sleep deprivation bow to the time where can I get more of it invest a minute return an hour always in debt where did it all go trade soul for just five more minutes past due dirt becomes the evenings dream dust and tomorrows ground coffee awaken with calves aching struggle to emerge from your cocoon as yesterdays sand timer shatters then buries the body below it’s grains of a.m. blanket procrastination snooze alarm turned off next mission rise up like the gravitational pull of tonights full moon legs stretch out from under blankets mind rises from sandman dusted dreams of sitting at a dining table with all those you’ve ever met feel a lifetime in a night awaken belly rumbling no more coffee and so much shit to do eat a bowl of cereal fall back asleep awaken shivering below bed sheets forget time just enough to still remember to get out of here eventually because it’s never a good day to take a day off and there is never enough time in a day to get everything done hustle and grind never ending eyes begin to close even tho they have just opened

Matt Clifford

You win. I am triggered. All the time. By everything, everywhere. I am a snowflake melting under the heat of a gun back into the water from which I came. But the waves are different and I am not the same person. I am a feeling that has been fucked. Now my feelings are fucked up. I get mad in the morning and sad when I watch television. I surround myself with love but can’t stop you from shooting through it. We carry very powerful weapons that are no match for each other. We see one another in the store and don’t say anything. We look at the wall screaming. We all know whose fault this is. But he isn’t taking questions. He is taking prisoners and putting them to work making examples of answers out of their confusion. It is not yet a crime to steal emptiness. You can do time for innocence. Nothing makes sense. And then there was this. I had a daydream I got there just in time. Maybe a few seconds too late. I did what had to ran him over before I learned the rest of the names. When I came to I was a famous hero who played it humble thanking thousands of years of empathy and instinct for drilling into me how to act in a moment. The credit goes to all of us, I only wish I could have gotten there sooner. We have a time to die. We create a way to live or life figures one for us. This is not the way to die. I have sat here for awhile trying to find

the next line making it about myself. In the time I have. I am still here and cannot find the next line. There is more time but no line. This is not the way to die.

My cat is a ghost who purrs mrrreowr in the middle of the night and chases what she must. I trust what she sees and what she says. She looks out the window until she can barely keep her eyes open. She hunts and has no idea what violence is. She is surrounded by the same deaths. Her tail wags. She does not kill without reason. She follows the bug around it and just wants to touch him. Will you play with me? Will you make it all worth something?

king of the stars, how did you get up there? king of the stars, who do you serve? king of the stars, what are you between? king of the stars, where am i to you?

I just lay here hoping not to get crushed in a rush to get bigger. There is a roof, or a ceiling, that places what it sees upon the size it sees it as in relation. I am underneath. The sheltered. Anything higher would eat me alive. How could I make plans with an asteroid? My house would have little place to fit it. We work better with fire as a metaphor or controlled substance. The smoke from the oven floats out the window. We use the door. It smells good out here. I hope the building doesn’t collapse. I pray nothing hits us. I just kneel here and appeal to higher powers. Are you who provides the best circumstances for survival? Count backwards from zero and become one again. Wake up with a hole and string of numbers to fill it with. Get back to work. Appeal to the common good. I sacrificed my poor time at the architect’s altar of

modern medicine with a lawyer present under a banner advertising universal remote controls for a smarter tomorrow. Goodbye my time it’s been real.

doctor of the kings, how did you get in there? doctor of the kings, who do you serve? doctor of the kings, is the agreement confidential? doctor of the kings, could i get one too? I just pay here and then we are done. You can go back to your roof, or ceiling, the same size as the receipt reads. Sit there and read all about your condition. You can read about the planets and the comets and the bugs on the bottom of the ocean. You don’t have to go anywhere right now. Just lay here and wait for betrayal. It is a long time away. The bones are good. Enjoy the day, enjoy the house, the grounds.

god of the doctors,

how do we get out of here?

god of the doctors, who do you serve?

god of the doctors, how do we help them all?

god of the doctors, will you see me soon? I just wait here. The room is good.

– 154

Clifford

what the fuck would you know about forgiveness at four in the morning?

i went back to bed didn’t work even when the money was good like i had enough took a deep breath and said this one is for myself my savior you can save some parts they are too deep in others you can tear me apart if i find them in there my god there will be tax to pay why can’t i stay away i don’t even like doing it the way winters ruin so cold and begotten when the hours come back i’ll be at the bottom of a mountain on a pile of blankets catching snowflakes in my teeth

catching snowflakes in my teeth while i still got them time making products i am a creation of space alien for money it hurts tho it’s funny running a victory lap around a flat tire oh lord he is always on the highway i want to do it his way drive about forgiveness at five in the morning sleep on it when we get there is nowhere to go

I’d like to be the manager that i may talk to myself

Yes you again what is the problem

This time is no good

I’m not having a good time

I’d like a new one

Well we can’t just take it back Where would we put it That isn’t my problem

My problem is your time

And if it takes any more time Then we are going to have two problems

And the space to put them ain’t one

Space was a separate problem

Then the space-time continuum was invented on a kids menu

And when i solved the maze

I knew the answer to the problem

It was to give them all the time they need

We’ve got the time

If they’ve got the space

Let’s do it all night

Endless time

You need some more time with those breadsticks sweetheart

Take it Take some time home with you Bring some time to your mother

Put the time in the refrigerator Save it for tomorrow

Let this time sit It gets better with age doesn’t need to be flavored or placed in the oven just take some time outside take some time with yourself breathe all over it you like that time yes it’s fine are you satisfied have you had enough time

would you like to speak to the next manager cause i am all out of time for this problem i’ve got other problems like i’m running out of time i gave it all away that’s just how time works i wasn’t late for work time was early time works too hard it could take a break just stop for a second take some time for itself some me-time a time for time to figure out who it is would that be ok with you no we demand more time just one more time hit me baby

we’ve only got a little time left so don’t wait any longer the time is right to figure out what time it is what time is it game time woo

The president is listening to music on broken headphones

There isn’t any bass cutting through He always felt he’d be famous just not in such a telephone way He always thought he could sing

The president is talking over the music on a broken connection There aren’t any diplomats coming home He never felt he’d be wrong not in such a public way He always thought he could fight

The president is screaming at the music for misunderstanding

There isn’t any nuance in these lyrics

He has nothing against love not least the destructive ones

He always thought he could fuck

The president is fucking the music up The president is making the music laugh

The president is working the crowd

The president is live He always felt at home He has a favorite song He always thought he could dance The president is a real entertainer He has a picture of the king in his office He maintains their relationship is The president is playing with his son behind closed doors

There isn’t any music

We always suspected harmony just not in such a silent way

We forget we could shut up for a moment and never thought to ask The president is asking for more again

A Flag as a Makeshift Alter

Number 1 chancellor road has been staring at the same point for generations now and the journey forward is the journey back to the past. Before you deliberately ferment chaos for a few donor dollars, the ever clever manipulative tactics of the esoteric, a sense of purpose is what you should cultivate. The flag is the only thing left for you to wave, the fists have become the open palms, and the open palms have become a thrusting back and forth pointing finger. But before you tell us the blacks are failures- that black countries are failures first thank the blacks for not putting arrows in your ancestor’s backs as they exterminated our grandmothers, as they curved countries out of our country into private property. The past is etched in all of our eyes, the old glory has spread thinner. Black is always trying to be adjacent to white to stay black. Racism has gone downstairs and we can’t have the fake without the original. Half there, now we wait...

Kirsty A. Niven

Cycles

The mad girl spiral, time for another loop –one last dip in the tumultuous pool, the roundabout of waves that wail on and on. A final round in the squared circle, ghosts face me in the top left corner ready with another ectoplasm right hook. Tori Amos – ‘Winter’ repeats again. I can still feel the dried grass on my elbows. Pollen scent. The sensation sinks.

The Bottom

Like Plath, I have been to the bottom –dragging limp feet along the ocean’s floor. Disposed plastic clinging to my mulchy skin, abandoned shells cracking under my toes. I’ve said goodbye in a hundred letters, sent them off in discarded Bordeaux bottles and watched them float to the surface. It became an odd kind of comfort –relaxing in the reef, drowning in my sorrows. I hadn’t realized that teetering on the edge of possibility could be so much worse, crystal happiness dangling over the jagged rocks, shadows of love dashed upon their points –coastal compost, prey for Jamaica Inn’s wreckers. Strangled by sultry seaweed, its grasping arms holding fast to my desperate dreams.

Hesitation Marks

A sea of cooling milk beneath: unexpectedly soft and sweet. My stained lips leave a crescent moon in blood, a tattooed welt on your shoulder.

A regimented row of indents curves, the token smile left behind.

Dark Star

Dark star, I wish I were as elusive as you –darting across the evening sky and never looking back at morning’s dew.

I know that I alone felt that high. Your concrete casing deflects all sight, guarding you from obligations –the freedom for which you fight. No sign of crumbling foundations.

You tower above, forever unseen, moving from one dream to another powered only by potent caffeine and I’m subsisting like every other.

Still to know you is to feel and to spew poetry in a constant spiel.

Love Lockdown

We live in a Nin bubble always feeling with raw nerve endings splattered like Pollock paintings but with marginally more elegance.

I am the ghost in the cracks, filling the spaces in between. The overflowing inbox you didn’t see coming, the SMS philosophies we wind together with words (all without ever leaving bed).

Patio Petrichor

Wet Shorts on a Hot deck cold contact steaming Patio Petrichor Dry Lips

Fingertips wrinkled like raisins

Topographical Exploration

Peaks Valleys I climb your canyon

Love Fun Late nights

High Drives

We main line the good times

Wringing out clothes

Rushing water Twilight Dances Everyday a Sunset Rising to the next Blinking through the weeks

Journal Entry: The Light at Night

Home late, my love already asleep on the other side of town. Across the street, a parked car in the school lot, headlights shine through my bedroom window. The streetlight, yes, I get. That’s a constant intrusion, a sense of comfort when I wake in the darkness to see that bit of radiance at the foot of the bed. The full moon, too every month a clock in the heavens

counting minutes across the floor. Sometimes, I count the hours. But this car, can’t they tell their light is unwanted, that it cuts through the night I love? I’ve been told I’m difficult to live with. I don’t deny it. I rarely check the time after lovemaking. I have greater concerns. Sometimes, a police car sits hidden in the shadows of the park to catch people like me speeding through town, people like me so full of something akin to happiness. Happy with fiery affection, yes, but something else.

Another ten minutes, then I’ll go out and ask whoever’s sitting in that car to please cut the halogens aimed at my room. Maybe they have a short temper. Maybe they have a gun or a knife. And me in whatever clothes I manage to pull on before this confrontation. I must be a fool. Maybe they are a lover, too. Maybe spent. Maybe spurned. And this little bit of light is all they have to remind them there is always something in those microscopic moments before dawn, something

only a matter of a few feet in front of the car. Something, maybe just a moth dancing in rapture, in light, before us.

after the party

Prather – 176 –

Spahr-Summers

Burning

kissed by the sun's tryst with the sea felt in a tentacle's intimacy, they swelter, seek the remoteness of seaweed made shelter, needing the salt as solvent.

Bert Bug

Catacanthus incarnatus

Singapore seems the least likely place to find Bert without Ernie, so far from Sesame Street, which I never wanted to watch as a child, all that constant counting and reciting of letters. There was no annoying Elmo when I was young just a grouch, a monster, a bird, and a mastodon. And a vampire, of course. Even though he could only count to twelve, he was my favorite, with a widow’s peak, a monocle, and purple skin.

But this stinkbug in Asia, photographed at just the right angle, carries the visage of one half of that gay/not-gay puppet couple, yellow pallor, caterpillar eyebrows, tufted black pompadour. How could this be camouflage? Does it look like some man-faced, yellow orchid that grows on a low hillside in danger of being lost to another stretch of pavement? Perhaps, one day, someone will find a mantis that flares its legs to look like Kermit the Frog, or a spider that folds all its legs into a trunk to disguise itself as Mr. Snuffleupagus. Maybe evolution will create a canary as caring as Big Bird, with a long, carroty beak and bauble eyes. Crazy to happen upon

a bug like this, one that begs the question of an Ernie bug with wings of orange and red and black arranged as though in perpetual smile. If I could, I would live on that flower. I would be that happy.

Journal Entry: After Considering Not Planting a Garden

Clouds clear, I watch the mail carrier leave something in the box, probably junk, nothing, that is, to keep me from sweating over these tomato plants I should have put in the ground weeks ago. My father may have taught me how far apart the plants should be spaced, but my grandmother told me a little sweat on the leaves is what makes them grow. Her neighbor used to spit on flowers to assure a good bloom. A couple years ago,

the tomatoes ripened so fast, there was no keeping up. No matter how many were eaten or given away or put up in jars, there were always more and more and more. Some went bad waiting their turn on the counter, mush to the touch, a white mold around the stem. Gnats, or fruit flies, or whatever-those-hovering-specks-might-be linger for days. I don’t expect much from these vines. It’s late in the growing season, and the weather goes from flood to drought. A fool, I will check tomorrow for the slightest

growth, the subtlest sign of change.

It always seems the weeds grow faster, the rubbery stems of purslane, the tangles of ground ivy, the choking stems of bindweed.

I wanted zucchini, jalapeños, pole beans, cucumbers. I remember walking the rows of corn my father had to lift when a storm made them bow to their gods of wind and rain. I remember pulling back tough hulls to check the kernels, snapping off the good ears.

The buttery feast. I can’t predict the bloom, or the setting on of fruit. There may be

aphids and cutworms, whiteflies, wilt, and rot.

There may be days so hot, the body will feel like fire, skin ripening in the afternoon sun.

blue trees

Prather – 184 – Spahr-Summers

Picasso Bug

Sphaerocoris annulus

This bug looks blessed with old magic, sorcery-of-the-sun magic, as though the artist wandered into the landscape and brushed those colors onto pebbles, brought them to life. Each spot could be misplaced to fool predators, to give them stink eye, evil eye, eye of curse and bad mojo. I might have used more purple, more

blue, found a use for orange, a smudge of fuchsia, but I’ve never mastered canvas and color. Years ago, I had friends who painted the shells of box turtles, signed their names upon their backs, the flair of gods in training. Now, I know the damage they can do. Only a master can bestow their name like this, hues of green and yellow and red, a shield against every violence.

Up in Smoke

mother has to take the cigarette out of her mouth to kiss me. sometimes she lets me take it out myself and fake a puff or two. she teaches me 2 + 2 and 4 x 5 with a couple packs of Menthol Lights. it’s more fun than counting on your fingers: smoke rings are added to the equation. * smoke is always her main course. at meals, she inhales while she is eating. tonight it mingles with a steamy bowl of lentil soup: smoke pressed through her lips as the exhaust fumes of mastication.

*

The larger Equations Come Later:

at 3 packs a day, how many cartons does mommy smoke a year? in 3 years? how many years before mommy starts hacking up blood and losing her hair?

* after a while, she spends more time coughing than breathing. sometimes she just skips the matches and lights the next cigarette on the last one. sometimes she lights the cigarette but she’s coughing too hard to inhale.

* her cough is a gun going off in the middle of the night a rorschach splash on the pillow case.

I fear cancer is contagious I take cover in spider’s quarters, underneath the basement stairs.

I tally up the day’s misfortunes on the abacus of a daddy long legs. * saturday mornings and wednesday nights she goes for “atomic therapy.” at first, I fear they will blow her up, and I sit tensed in the waiting room listening for the explosion and my mother’s screams. After a half-dozen or so treatments, her hair is getting thin as sewing thread. She’s so nauseous after chemo she dreads the smell of good home cooking.

I spin circles on the counter stool inside the hospital cafe. I order a deluxe cheeseburger with fries. Every time I go to the hospital I squeeze-shut my eyes and begin a series of three-sixties: I spin towards a country where cancer isn’t calling the shots.

In the last months, her hair starts to fall out in clumps; I find her unraveling everywhere. Today it’s a C for cancer floating in my corn chowder, a strand is the moon, rising on the sofa.

I collect it late at night, gather as much as I can of a mother’s vanishing life. I stash it in a small oak box where I used to keep my marbles.

I Lived in Iowa

when Dad was in Vietnam. I asked him later if he killed anyone. He told me you could never tell: such smoke and chaos. Lack of vision. I don’t think he used these words. It’s just my memory that decorates, useless as the Purple Heart he was awarded but

never got the ocular proof, as that good soldier, Othello, says.

Zimmerman – 193 – Spahr-Summers

lemon

I Was a Whale in the ocean of my mother. Leviathan: I swallowed all. Breached, breathing, naming, aging since. These are only markers, harpoons in the flesh of sentience.

I’ve Been Re-reminded Lately that my thoughts aren’t real. They’re clouds or falling leaves. Angels. Demons. I see them. I can grab them. I can encompass them. They are not me but products I create. They could be art. They could be commerce. They could be trash. They are compostable, I think.

Falling Asleep

Curling into a question mark eyes shuttered lips pursed hands empty. Dropping through long dusty shafts down into dank cellars. Leaving behind faded day. That last cup of sunlight pouring from fingertips. Lulled by rattling trains, sighs of motors.

- 196

McNerney

Bringing nothing but memory into night. Now I will untie knots tear off wrappings opening wide bundles of dreams.

elephant memories

McNerney – 197 – Spahr-Summers

J. D. Nelson

Nelson - 198 – Spahr-Summers

Julie K. Shavin

Penultimate Days

Again, a falling green wilderness of thoughts like the cracking of a heart like an egg on a pan like a bulb like a room going out like a winter confounded by spring.

Various things cloud the mind, toggle the totem of memory in these our old sequestered days spent reading ourselves backwards into our braille beginnings, the sky a template for sorrow that stamps our joys on the ageless face of Time,

arguing with seconds like bleeding argues with clotting or sleep with wakefulness sneezing with breathing, standing with falling –a catatonia of ghost possibilities that live forever side by side like spittle in the throat of a horn or something out of whack –like a cricket with no rhythm. We share a nothingness larger than large is defined. Give me the answer in watts, one demands dumbly, knowing drab December brings more color to our grief than we thought possible of any month or feeling. We row our very names down the water, and the names they would have given us but for our gender treachery.

Also, we can't remember what children were for, now that we've made some and given them our most famous faces.

red tree

Shavin – 201 – Spahr-Summers

Sweet High Bath of Unknowing

Bright sun, oblique sun of late afternoon in a small alpine town, white and tan horses grazing snow melt and snow in lazing fields...

Could I remember more of childhood or its sibling, youth, I might know what it is about capturing beauty, such as horses in a winter's field, paradox of fierce wan sun, frail askew houses on tilting hills.

Will I give to darkness, not a trace of warm breath nuzzling some sweet high bath of land, gently withering away sweet morsels that rise, valiant, to meet the longing tongue?

Leaving, I saw again how day is sniped by night in abandon, fields become blind eyes, faces tipped to stars, cold moon cratered with sequestered keepsakes of day.

Might one conjure what beckoned this time –not the illness, as in those urgent, more somber days –but what continues to lure to alien terrain, to genteel murderous horses, clapboard houses blinking, grand shadows of margin less mountains –and with such need to sing, to paint, to speak the certain vex of nostalgia, for what, exactly – can I, can one, ever say?

All in Order and True

In order not to eat, my mother smoked cigarettes. My grandmother her mother had called her fat all her young life, then died when my mother was fifteen. So to not eat, my mother smoked – all day. All night. In all rooms. In the car with the windows rolled up. In the bathroom just before brushing her teeth. Through three pregnancies. Surely in her dreams. The Trues in their carton crooned above the wall oven. To not eat, my sister took up anorexia. An eighty-three pound five-foot-nine scaffold of skin and straw hair. A scarecrow that made us think until we didn’t. To not eat dessert my mother took up sunflower seeds between smokes. To avoid oil she took up air-popped corn. To not eat meals, I took up bingeing at midnights. Fasting all through school. To not smoke his Tiparillos, my father took up Oreos and chips. To not snack, he took up Valium and ERs. My cookieless father quit looking pregnant but my seedless mother birthed and nurtured loathing for him. When my father died, to not eat, smoke, or do seeds or corn, my mother took up colon cancer. All day. All night. In all rooms. In the car with the windows up. In the bathroom just before brushing her teeth. Deep inside her dreams. She survived, and in order to eat no words, we the remaining rarely speak. To take up little space in one another. To not eat, we binge on denial and fabrication, we, the pretend-full, the roomless, dreamless, windowless, going-on toothless – ghosty, skinny as smoke-wisps.

Marionettes Among Us

In old age, chthonic thoughts surface from the sanctum of dimming memory. How we long for something to convince us we are not strung along for nothing, that vital hues never take to their graves. But rattlesnakes laze in impermanent skin, and so do we.

Winsome angels droop their eyeless heads towards perfect somnolence, and yet we stand wide-eyed. Will we make sleep masks of even our wooden dreams?

The old adages become old hags, wisps of forsaken god fingers. Who will show that death is but small genius?

Who will show himself to the brave brave air?

Who will deny the show goes on when our hands and feet the new toys wear?

sunspot

Shavin – 206 – Spahr-Summers

Ojo Olumide Emmanuel

Fire is a Metaphor for a Country Dancing Naked Inside the Rain

when man first discovered fire he barbecued a rabbit, tasted that it was good & burnt the fat to his god in thanksgiving. another man tested the fire on his beards & that was the origin of safety rules. in Kaduna, fire derailed a train & the news headline set a country ablaze. It’s rainy season and the whole country is dancing naked inside the rain. a toad does not seek to triumph over a petulant drizzle; something must be chasing it. in Gunu, stray bullets sets the locals on fire; those who escaped this fire were eaten

by the cleavage of a river as they fled in their canoes; a score was the last count… this poem is about how all the glories of a flower becomes a shadow because something dances around it. if you see men taking to their heelsask them for the flames quickening their feet.

elemental

Spahr-Summers

21st Century

In the 21st Century, everybody gets their 15 minutes of privacy. Enjoy it all while it lasts. The 17 waking hours

that follows aren't yours.

Umbrella

Pursue

Keeping the things that make life interesting banned buried cancelled censored out of reach silenced suppressed in Decency's name only invites the Curious Allen - 211

to pursue their secret charm's controversial Power. 890 sq. ft. of reality Allen – 212 – Spahr-Summers

Robert Knox

Ancient Letters

You mean those epistles written in adolescent solitude, sick with desire and speechlessness?

What could one say, having advanced only so far down the unilluminated tunnel of muddling discomfort, with no brighter model for discourse, no curriculum of civilized conduct, beyond that provided by the narrator of a famous war novel, earnestly seeking to make time with the attractive nurse?

“Love me,” I might have written, in the speechlessness of those dark hours, for surely things will fall out better for us than for the tragic object of my sole lovelorn literary model, even as oceans of Eros rose to drown me, leaving those long-ago scribbles dead on the page.

Beauty, Use

Nobody’s gonna be good all the time Nobody’s gonna be right all the time

But if you’re taking what you’ve been given and doing something of use or beauty with it that brought benefit to even one person –sleeping in the bed you made, eating your food, warming their chilly fingers in the muff, the tea cozy (eyeing the flower in the pot), you create from the materials at hand then surely you are fulfilling your purpose here on Earth

Beauty is useful –it is the highway to truth

We exist to discover, embrace, contribute beauty Hence the Keatsian formula – beauty/truth, truth/beauty... That is all you need to know,

and in times such as these, you need to know it.

cluster fuck Knox – 215 – Spahr-Summers

Chair People

My father had his recliner

Now that I am of an age and station that I always thought of as ‘his,’

I long for those solitary hours of ‘relaxing,’ a favorite word for the private occupations of his day, that made me wonder ‘from what?’

Now I consume the same such hours with a lasting avidity

A book, a show, a game, an occasional off-duty pass from the runaway chariot that drags me to that penal chair where I pound stony minutes to dust

All Those Homely Longings

Inhaling early October dark, that special blend: Evenings so rich you can drink the memory of an afternoon’s warmth. Remembering this hour all those other sacred hours, those sudden-early evening closures, premonitions perhaps, that everything we love must also, beautifully, as whisper-sweet and sad as twilight, give up the ghost to a pure and wordless darkness speaking only of the light from other worlds. Drinking then of nature’s cocktail of concentrated memoires, distant addresses of the heart, remembering homes that linger in the love of rural spaces, neighborhoods of trees: a someplace in the woods, phoneless, off the grid, or planted among fields, squeezed into the end of furrows, dwellings of wood stoves and fireplaces, wells, outhouses, barn cats with adoption papers and litters on the way,

row houses in fading mill towns, plywood cabins on the dirt road out of town, intimations then of that other town, deeper still, in the lands beyond the building code.

Memories of a home, that is, never found ‘in town,’ but in some transitory, alternative everyplace pitted with human complexities, ambiguous connections worrying up the daylight… And yet at day’s end still, unworldly hours: Pure and unaccountable, measureless moments here or there, fleeting, impossible to pull back later to interrogate, to remember, even, when the mind searches for them, as for a lifeline to deeper understandings.

Later, searching for them, Tugging in the dark for lost threads of an old story, listening for ancient songs,

notes beyond the range of ordinary hearing, thoughts without words, feelings without names, recovering only this: the sacred yearning silence of an autumn twilight, a timeless day’s-end dusky falling, a calling for a home among the trees. red tree 2

Prosopagnosia

Blinding a nation: Who does this to us, to the little people, the base, on which the speaker, the chosen one, invokes the sins of his own doing to inscribe them on the backs of those less innately devious, and drive them from the flock?

Who throws the dust in the eyes of the many, weeping for relief and for the want of something truly to behold? We cannot see our executioners until they have faces.

Disassembling Marconi

I hear Mariachi static on my radio And the tubes they glow in the dark Warren Zevon

At five I took to disassembling radios to find the spot within, that sparked metallic voice into song – the component whose musical repertoire made my sisters spring into dance on a makeshift stage with rag curtains.

I would stare for hours into this breadbox Wurlitzer –to locate the source of mimicry – the cathode tubes glowing in the dark – lighting the way to the next act.

”Disassembling Marconi”, NoD. Magazine 2007 purple much

Juanita Rey

People Apart

It takes lands pulling apart to make islands, violent tremors under oceans, so parents drift southward in fire and their children blow north toward the cold until it all settles and they’re a thousand or more miles apart, all wondering, with this distance between, can we love enough –without touch, or sharing a glass or taking a wash cloth and dabbing something from another’s eye –one can wear the dress that comes to the door in a package, the other tacks a photograph on a kitchen wall –

brown skin playing in white snow –in my chosen life, the past is no less with me but so is the place I live now –sometimes, it takes people pulling apart to make people.

dreamy

Rey – 224 – Spahr-Summers

Cold Snap in the Bayou

Your Mangroves have Stars in their beards. It’s clear to see. Their Moment has come. The Planet ducks its head and swivels. Pewter. Says the Sun. An alligator breaks the scum of ice. Steam. Musk. Keep still. Watch your step. There are balls of sleeping snakes. Waiting to wake. Vultures. Spotting the sky. Their descent to Earth is swift.

Winter Barn

Gentle Beasts. Scorched in Cold Metal. Milk. Steaming. Yellow and White. Sharp Smell of Hay. Rich with Dung. Hoof. Cud. Bellow.

Ice Fishing On Capital Lake

Look at The Hole. The Hole we have Chopped in The Ice. Water Bobbing Up. A Guilty Man’s Gullet. Look at The Pike. Darting Below Us. Frozen. Panicked with Teeth. We Have Wax Worms and Minnows. Jig Heads and Swivels. Hooks Full of Passion. A Bucket to Bleed In. Winter. This is Winter. Darkness at Dawn. Whiskey and Cheese.

Hand's Been Dealt

Out shadow! Sink mud sets. Open heart until dry. Just one thing Between me And the sun And it flickers. Awaken beam! Pale fire spits. Open mind until calm.

This wood Is so soft It dries and flakes Into dust. One path travels, One stone turns. This life can feel like a whisper. One dam breaks And all wounds Heal.

Spahr-Summers

Festival of Dreams

Inhabitants of villages in the darkness of a dark continent of black people with dark hopes in the city of lights for the first time the mesmerizing effects make a people feel guilty for staining the bedazzling sight with their inferior skin and identity they wonder if there’s space in the light for the black somewhere in the masses stands a little black boy

blind to critics, racists, politricks, politics, and all the ‘tics ticking obstacles into his path to the top in his heart a big festival of dreams and possibilities that out of ashes shall rise beauties and the great

Mary K. Cain

Aeolian

I was going to write a word on the west wind but before I could turn to gather a pen or the red tail hawk feather that fell into the yard or raise my index finger to test the direction it changed and was gone.

Into the Dark

Sister Frances Dominic had a penchant for the stars. It was she who first spoke the name of Cassiopeia, emphasis on the fourth syllable: ancient queen of the night, aloft on her tilted throne. I have to turn my head like an owl to get the view just right in summer. Sister Frances Dominic loved math and science, so her story was the power of configuration, best time of year to bring the regal one to sight. She shared none of the elaboration, the earthly braggadocio about who was most beautiful; an old insistence that has haunted women since as much as it has astronomers who put her in the sky. There! Just see what too much pride will get you: a place, perpetual, in the heavens, your tale forgotten until an old nun revives it to her ninth-grade class. There was talk of a star-gazing party from the school roof. A trip never organized.

Liability, no doubt. Though to this day when I step out into the dark I always look up to see how she still reigns there,

beauty too proud to stay on earth. Tilting my head like an owl to get a better view of her, aslant on her crooked throne.

And I wonder if Sister Francis Dominic, dead many years now, would be proud or distressed to learn that I tracked the star queen’s story to the way the Welsh told it, Llys Dôn, the Court of Dôn, another goddess; or how Chinese astronomers saw a bridge, a whip, a chariot; that Arab atlases record a hennaed hand rising in the northeastern summer view I favor. And that in India, her daughter, Andromeda, stood posing nearby; and how I have come to love the science and the mythologies, equally.

Don’t Regurgitate Love

in the pedestrian commonplace advertising influx. Instead emanate the essence. In spring be the emergence of mating songbird trills. Express the various colors of tulips with personal responses. Share the expanding sunlight. In summer, leave wet morning bare feet patterns

in the shape of a heart.

Offer the thirst-quenching quality of ice cubed sun tea.

Create an early evening ocean breeze.

In autumn, define the shades of changing leaves.

Allow the flight of V shaped honking geese to define leadership.

Emit the many facets of pumpkin. In winter, release the scent of distant wood smoking chimneys. Breathe the essence of broth vapors and become the tongue that catches single snowflakes.

Complex Connotation

I should have made it much more difficult for you to leave. I knew those looks and lips, tasted and touched the desire. But I listened to the words and words are shadow creatures that dress properly by day and in the evening disappear in the privacy of self.

What I Do for a Living

I sell Japanese-inspired Chinese-manufactured German engineered Malaysian-printed Honduran-designed American-owned Canadian distributed no one knows what it’s for.

Benna Gaean Maris

cognitions of uneasiness

a dreary place where to live with eyes only for it with faith for the salvation the shelter where nothing can hurt except what happens slowly except what chases suddenly in spite of powerful authority and the right for stillness so good and evil are mixed only oneself is important hypocrisy of the fraternity deceit of the superiority of salvation in the other

useless declarations of selves soon eclipsed by others our fathers hid banalities our mothers taught how to forget till the oblivion until man believes in man probing the void

lightning strike Maris – 241 – Spahr-Summers

the faintest caress with time transforms the rock forever ~ the most brutal force on the instant transforms water temporarily ~ the rock contains water water shapes the rock ~ water and rock don’t exist they are the same undifferentiated thing that chose different times

october poem

feeling low i drink and drive, chance death for something more i dream of misplaced smiles, but it’s no use, they’re all gone, they’re long gone i drive past cars, darkened homes, withering gardens, and unfamiliar streets…

at home the lonely bird feeders are empty i fill them just to hear the seed fall like march rain

A Break in the Line of Time

After I retired, I forgot who I was, the woods thick with vine, leaf and weed. Above me a canopy of insects, snakes, squirrel, possum and raccoon. I did not know of predators, but I paid hard attention. I fell asleep on soft brush, shared my bed with a family of deer. A day later, the scope of earth began changing shape, tremors rippled along the tree-line,

and a slim animal trail opened up.

I followed it to a stream, then a river, then a town, my hair gray and white, my beard tangled and singed, but my clothes freshly pressed, my shoes un-scuffed, my eyes bright and curious.

Valerie A. Szarek

Bone Games

“There is dinosaur tar in my bone marrow” Fred Lamotte

I, like you, have risen from the earth

From eggs carried by our grandmothers, All of us birds, wings folded under our skin

My vertebrae are made of turtle shell

Skin christened by the Milky Way

Nails the translucent petals of skeleton flowers

Dinosaur tar came from my Hungarian side

When we ate stone and maidenhair fern

When the earth was softer, more malleable

Everything that ever was is in our marrow,

Every being a word in this long poem

As a lizard I feared the pterodactyl

As a worm I feared deluges that drown

As a baby bird I feared the cold

As a dinosaur I learned to fear

The tar that held my feet in place

As a human with shared DNA in my bones

How can I OM myself peaceful

How can I trust a clouds’ shadow to Not be a hunter searching for me

How can I learn to trust the rain?

As a being of earth

Whose consciousness do I walk in?

It is a miracle

If we are not afraid

All of the time

Contributors’ Notes

Dee Allen is an African-Italian performance poet based in Oakland, California. Active on creative writing & Spoken Word since the early 1990s. Author of 7 books Boneyard, Unwritten Law, Stormwater, Skeletal Black [ all from POOR Press ], Elohi Unitsi [ Conviction 2 Change Publishing ] and his 2 newest, Rusty Gallows [ Vagabond Books ] and Plans [ Nomadic Press ] and 61 anthology appearances under his figurative belt so far. Currently seeking a new publisher to transform his finished manuscript into a finished, printed 8th book.

Tohm Bakelas is a social worker in a psychiatric hospital. He was born in New Jersey, resides there, and will die there. His poems have appeared in numerous journals, zines, and online publications. He is the author of 19 chapbooks and several collections of poetry, including “No Destination” (Kung Fu Treachery Press, 2021) and “The Ants Crawl In Circles” (Whiskey City Press, 2022). He runs Between Shadows Press.

Brian Barnett is the author of the middle grade novellas Graveyard Scavenger Hunt and Chaos at the Carnival. He has over three hundred publishing credits in dozens of magazines and anthologies such as the Lovecraft eZine, Spaceports & Spidersilk, Scifaikuest, and Three Line Poetry.

Ben Barrett is a middle school life science teacher in northern Virginia. He spent six years in Colorado exploring and journeying into local realms of music, farming and alternative medicine. He values simple pleasures over finer things, humility over recognition, and kindness over critical acclaim. Most of his free time is spent contemplating new ways to speak truth to power and bring light to the world's dark places.

Dennis J. Bernstein is an award-winning poet. His previous volume, Five Oceans in a Teaspoon, won the 2020 IPPY Gold Medal Award for Poetry and the 2020 Best Book Award for Poetry by the American Bookfest, and was a finalist in 2020 Best Book Award, Poetry International Book Awards. Bernstein’s previous collection, Special Ed: Voices from a Hidden Classroom, won the 2012 Artists Embassy International Literary Cultural Award. (cut save for the inside of

book?) His poetry has appeared in The New York Quarterly, Bat City Review, Texas Observer, ZYZZYVA, and numerous other journals. Bernstein’s artists’ books/plays French Fries and GRRRHHHH: a study of social patterns, co-authored with Warren Lehrer, are considered seminal works in the genre, and are in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Georges Pompidou Centre, and other museums around the world.

Chara Booker is the Empress of All She Surveys. Looking for the magic and poetry in our daily lives continues to inspire her.

Michael Brockley is a retired school psychologist who lives in Muncie, Indiana. His poems have appeared in RockPaperPoem, Marrow Magazine, and Visiting Bob: Poems Inspired by the Life and Art of Bob Dylan. Poems are forthcoming in Parliament Literary Poetry Journal and Shorts Magazine.

Steven Bruce is a poet, writer, and award-winning author. His poetry and short stories have appeared in magazines, webzines, and anthologies worldwide. In 2018, he graduated from Teesside University with a Master’s Degree in Creative Writing. He is the recipient of the Indies Today Five-star Recommendation Badge. Born in the North of England, he now lives and writes full-time out of an apartment in Barcelona.

Nick Bruno has appeared in publications such as: Shenandoah, NoD Magazine, Adirondack Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, The Arabesques Review, Blue Fifth Review, Eclectica, Stirring, Snow Monkey and Sidereality. He is presently living and writing in Canada.

Mary K. Cain is a poet and nonfiction writer from Arvada, CO. She received a poetry fellowship from the Colorado Council on the Arts. Her nonfiction book The Cottonwood Tree: An American Champion (2007) was nominated for a Colorado Book Award and included as part of the Nebraska 150 Books Project. Recent work has appeared in Abandoned Mine, Bristlecone, The Comstock Review, and Mad Blood #7 (Spring 2022). She was also a featured reader for the 2022 100,000 Poets for Change event in Denver.

Matt Clifford is the author of eight books, bassist of Black Market Translation, co-founder of Punketry and Boulder’s full moon midnight alleyway reading, editor at Turnsol Editions, and treasurer of four nonprofits.

Those all being indeed nonprofitable, for money Cliff provides a sliding scale accounting service facilitating the relationship of overtaxed and underfinanced artists and anarchists with their government. He holds an MFA from Naropa’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics and lives in Denver with the cat Bjorknado de BoopBoop trying not to take shit too seriously. www.mattclifford.org

Pat Connors first chapbook, Scarborough Songs, was released by Lyricalmyrical Press in 2013, and charted on the Toronto Poetry Map. Other publication credits include: The Toronto Quarterly; Spadina Literary Review; Sharing Spaces; Tamaracks; and Tending the Fire. His first full collection, The Other Life, is newly released by Mosaic Press. Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/patrick.j.connors.3 Twitter: https://twitter.com/81912CON

Ojo Olumide Emmanuel is a Nigerian Poet and Book Editor. He is the Author of the Poetry Chapbook "Supplication For Years in Sands" (Polarsphere Books, 2021). His works have appeared and forthcoming at Feral, Quills, Poemify, Melbourne-Culture, Fictionniche, TNR and elsewhere. He is the editor-in-chief of the Nigerian Review. He is a fellow of the SprinNG Writers Fellowship. Say hi to him on Twitter @OjoOlumideEmma2

Gerry Fabian is a published poet and novelist. He has published four books of his published poems, Parallels, Coming Out Of The Atlantic, Electronic Forecasts and Ball On The Mound. In addition, he has published four novels : Getting Lucky (The Story), Memphis Masquerade, Seventh Sense and Ghost Girl. His web page is https://rgerryfabian.wordpress.com Twitter @GerryFabian2 Instagram https://www.instagram.com/gery3397/ Linkedin https://www.linkedin.com/in/gerry-fabian-91353a131/ Facebook https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100010099476497. He lives in Doylestown, PA

Dan Fijlek is an author and poet in Longmont, Colorado.

Eric Raanan Fischman is an MFA graduate of Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. He has taught free writing workshops in Nederland, Boulder, and Longmont, and has had work in Bombay Gin, the Boulder Weekly,

Suspect Press, and more, as well as in local community fundraising anthologies from Punch Drunk Press and South Broadway Ghost Society. His first book, "Mordy Gets Enlightened," was published through The Little Door in 2017.

Richard Fleming is an Irish-born poet and short story writer currently living on the island of Guernsey, which is located in the channel between England and France. He has written material for the BBC and various mainstream publications, and has two poetry collections in print: the more recent one, Stone Witness, is available online at https://www.blueormer.co.uk/ More of his poems and short stories can be found online at Bard at Bay, Http://redhandwriter.blogspot.com or on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/richard.fleming.92102564

Nicholas Gentile was born and raised in Yonkers NY. He is now retired and lives in York, SC. His poems have appeared in World Haiku Review, Better Than Starbucks, Poetry Quarterly, Three Line Poetry and several other journals.

G. Timothy Gordon Dreamwind was published 2020 (Spirit-of-the-Ram P), Ground of This Blue Earth (Mellen), while Everything Speaking Chinese was awarded Riverstone P Prize (AZ). Work appears in AGNI, American Literary R, Cincinnati P, Kansas Q, Louisville R, Mississippi R, New York Q, Phoebe, RHINO, Texas Observer, among others. Recognitions include several Pushcart nominations, residencies, and NEA and NEH fellowships. Gordon’s eighth book, Empty Heaven/Empty Earth, will be published November/December 2022. (69). Gordon divides lives between Southeast Asia and the Southwest Sonoran Desert Organ Mountains.

Amy Wray Irish grew up near Chicago, received her MFA from the University of Notre Dame, then fled the Midwest for Colorado sunshine. Amy loves work that blurs the lines between body and nature, image and word. Read more of her work at amywrayirish.com. And check out her 2020 chapbook, Breathing Fire, which was greatly influenced by Denver artist Madeleine Dodge and her metalwork “Rust” series.

Robert Knox is a poet, fiction writer, Boston Globe correspondent, and the author of the “Suosso’s Lane,” a novel of the Sacco-Vanzetti case. As a contributing editor for the online poetry journal, Verse-Virtual, his poems

appear regularly on that site. They have also appeared in journals such as The American Journal of Poetry, New Verse News, Unlikely Stories, and others. His poetry chapbook "Gardeners Do It With Their Hands Dirty" was nominated for a Massachusetts Best Book award. He was the winner of the 2019 Anita McAndrews Poetry Award.

David Lawton is the author of the poetry collection Sharp Blue Stream (Three Rooms Press) and chapbook Inspiritive (Moonstone Arts), and serves as an editor for greatweatherforMEDIA. He has work currently in From The Inside: NYC through the eyes of the poets who live here (Blue Light Press) and Call Me {Brackets} and upcoming in P-Queue and the New York Quarterly anthology Without a Doubt: Poems Illustrating Faith.

Morghan Leigh, a Boulder based visual artist, was born in the trash. Discovering the discarded as an art supply Pheonix, she transformed found objects into masterpieces. After attending the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD),Morghan realized that she did her best creative work in her home town on the Eastern Shore of Virginia. Working as a set designer for a non-profit with no budget honed her skills of spinning straw into gold. With new hopes of regenerative farming and “Bike Life,” Morghan decided her next masterpiece would be life exploration. Packed down with all the essentials and a few extras she began the Journey that eventually landed her in Boulder, CO. She can be found howling in alleys, screaming on stage, and paling around with poets. A new sublime scene where words are wings and everyone is flying Rocky Mountain High.

Marie C. Lecrivain is a poet, publisher, and ordained priestess in the Ecclesia Gnostica Catholica, the ecclesiastical arm of Ordo Templi Orientis. Her work has been published in California Quarterly, Chiron Review, Gargoyle, Nonbinary Review, Orbis, Pirene's Fountain, and many other journals. She's the author of several books of poetry and fiction, and editor of Ashes to Stardust: A David Bowie Tribute Anthology (forthcoming/copyright 2022 Sybaritic Press, www.sybpress.com).

Brice Maiurro is a poet and storyteller from Lakewood, Colorado. He is the founding editor of South Broadway Press. His books of poetry include Stupid Flowers and Hero Victim Villain. He is very happy to be an amateur mycologist and apiarist.

Benna Gaean Maris is an interdisciplinary and basically conceptual artist interested in raising awareness on metaphysical, human, social and environmental issues, expressing through a whole range of art disciplines, either

material or immaterial, including poetry, flash fiction and artist's book. Tirana International Biennale of Graphic Arts 2022 - Tirana Art Gallery - Tirana, Albania ; Geumgang Nature Art Biennale 2022, Gongju City, Korea

; Metaverse Biennale 2022, Bur Dubai, UAE / Internet ; The Wrong 5th Biennale of Digital Arts, internet, 2021-2022 ; Šiluva Art Biennial - Touched Land, 2021 - Pilgrim Center, Šiluva, Lithuania ; MADATAC XIBiennial of New Media Arts 2020 - NH Eurobuilding, Madrid, Spain ; BIENALSUR 2019 - Latin America Biennale - Various venues, Argentina / Brazil / Guatemala ; Triennale della Fotografia Italiana 2017 - Armenians Palace, Venezia, Italy Merit Awards @ UPWARD Gallery 2022, internet ; Exhibiting artist @ Festival of Time International Contest 2020 - St Michael church, Sermoneta, Italy ; 2nd Prize @ ExperimentoBIO 2019 - BilbaoArte Foundation, Bilbao, Spain ; 2nd Prize @ Cine Cube Award 2018 - Kunstmuseum Stuttgart, Germany

; Videographics Prize @ Pasinetti VideoPrize 2018 - Liceo Guggenheim, Venice, Italy ; 1st Prize + Performative Prize @ STAR Bene Contest 2017 - Municipal theatre, Teramo, Italy

Joan McNerney has poetry included in numerous literary magazines worldwide. She has four Best of the Net nominations. Her latest title is At Work available on Amazon.com.

Bruce McRae is an Canadian musician, a multiple Pushcart nominee with poems published in hundreds of magazines such as Poetry, Rattle and the North American Review. His books include ‘The So-Called Sonnets (Silenced Press); ‘An Unbecoming Fit Of Frenzy; (Cawing Crow Press) and ‘Like As If” (Pski’s Porch), Hearsay (The Poet’s Haven).

Stephen Mead is an outsider multi-media artist and writer. Since the 1990s he’s been grateful to many editors for publishing his work in print zines and eventually online. He is also grateful to have managed to keep various day jobs for the Health Insurance. Currently he is resident artist/curator for The Chroma Museum, artistic renderings of LGBTQI historical figures, organizations and allies predominantly before Stonewall, The Chroma Museum

Mark Mitchell was born in Chicago and grew up in southern California. His latest poetry collection, Roshi San Francisco, was just published by Norfolk Publishing. Starting from Tu Fu was recently published by Encircle Publications. A new collection, Something to Be and a novel are forthcoming. He is very fond of baseball, Louis Aragon, Miles Davis, Kafka

and Dante. He lives in San Francisco with his wife, the activist and documentarian, Joan Juster where he made his marginal living pointing out pretty things. Now, he’s looking for work again. He has published 2 novels and three chapbooks and four full length collections so far. His first chapbook won the Negative Capability Award. Titles on request. A meager online presence can be found at https://www.facebook.com/MarkJMitchellwriter/ A primitive web site now xists: https://www.mark-j-mitchell.square.site/ I sometimes tweet @Mark J Mitchell_Writer

J.B. Mulligan has published more than 1100 poems and stories in various magazines, and has published two chapbooks: The Stations of the Cross and THIS WAY TO THE EGRESS, as well as 2 e-books: The City of Now and Then, and A Book of Psalms (a loose translation), plus appearances in more than a dozen anthologies.

Tendai Rinos Mwanaka is a Zimbabwean publisher, editor, mentor, thinker, literary artist, visual artist and musical artist with over 50 books published. He writes in English and Shona. His work has been nominated, shortlisted and won several prizes, that has also appeared in over 400 journals and anthologies from over 30 countries, and translated into Spanish, Shona, Serbian, Arabic, Bengali, Tamil, Macedonian, Albanian, Hungarian, Russian, Romanian, French and German. You can listen to his music here:https://soundcloud.com/tendai-rinos-mwanaka

Don Narkevic is from Buckhannon, WV. MFA National University. Current work appears/will appear in Agape, New Verse News, Bindweed, and Book of Matches. In Spring 2022, Main Street Rag published a novella of poetry entitled, After the Lynching.

J.D. Nelson (b. 1971) experiments with words in his subterranean laboratory. His poetry has appeared in many small press publications, worldwide, since 2002. He is the author of several collections of poetry, including Cinderella City (The Red Ceilings Press, 2012). Nelson’s poem, “to mask a little bird” was nominated for Best of the Net in 2021. Visit http://MadVerse.com for more information and links to his published work. His haiku blog is at http://JDNelson.net.Nelson lives in Colorado, USA.

Kirsty A. Niven lives in Dundee, Scotland. Her writing has been published in several anthologies including Poetry for Ukraine, This Book Is A Work: A Pro Wrestling Anthology and Landfall. Kirsty’s poetry has also appeared in numerous journals and magazines such as Up! Magazine, Pastel Serenity Magazine and Lothlorien Poetry Journal. You can also find her work online, on websites such as The Lake Poetry, Postcards from Malthusia and Bonnie’s Crew.

Benjamin Nambu has an affinity to antiquity, adores music and anything considered wild and unconventional. He believes he was born to inspire people to realize feats. He is from Ghana in West Africa, an identity he is proud to showcase on every platform.

Abigail Elizabeth Ottley writes poetry, short fiction from her home in Penzance in the UK. This poem was inspired by her relationship with an ailing, undernourished magpie fledgling she fed through the winter three years ago.

George Pestana a.k.a. OddWritings, is a life-long poet who started publishing his poetry in 2020. He has several self-published collections listed on his web site http://oddwritings.com, and has been published in Skyway Journal, Open Skies Quarterly, Writes of the Round Table, and Quintessence. He enthusiastically promotes the dissemination of poems in the form of NFTs (non-fungible tokens), and has published many of his poems in that format on the OpenSea and Voice platforms. He was also the featured poet in issue # 48 of The Tickle and has been interviewed by The Metaverse Post concerning his NFT and metaverse-related activities. He lives in Austin, Texas, worshipping his air conditioner and his massive collection of old books.

Dave Prather is the author of We Were Birds from Main Street Rag Publishing. His work has appeared in several print and online journals, including Prairie Schooner, Still: The Journal, Poet Lore, Potomac Review, Sheila-Na-Gig, Seneca Review, and many others. He studied acting at the National Shakespeare Conservatory, and he studied writing at Warren Wilson College.

Juanita Rey is a Dominican poet who has been in this country five years. Her work has been published in Pennsylvania English, Opiate Journal, Petrichor Machine and Porter Gulch Review.

Charlie Robert is a writer and poet living in Silicon Valley. His work has appeared in Milk and Cake Press, Iconoclast, NOMADartx, Rat’s Ass Review, The Rye Whiskey Review, Synchronized Chaos, Sacred Chickens, Orchards Poetry Journal, Pikers Press, and is forthcoming in others. He is currently seeking publication of a new Chapbook. Find him at: https://www.charlierobert.com/

Maggie Saunders is Beyond Academia LLC Chairperson. Autodidactic Poet. Absurdoist. Anarchist Educator. Frenetic Hummingbird. Martyr Heretic. Syncopated Dancer. Tangential Chaos.”

Jennifer Schneider is an educator who lives, writes, and works in small spaces throughout Pennsylvania. Recent works include A Collection of Recollections, Invisible Ink, On Habits & Habitats, and Blindfolds, Bruises, and Breakups. She is the 2022-2023 Montgomery County (PA) Poet Laureate.

Gregg Shapiro is the author of eight books including the poetry collection Fear of Muses (Souvenir Spoon Books, 2022). Lit-mag publications include The Penn Review, RFD, Gargoyle, Limp Wrist, Mollyhouse, Poetic Medicine, Impossible Archetype, Red Fern Review, Instant Noodles, Dissonance Magazine, The Pine Cone Review, as well as numerous anthologies. An entertainment journalist, whose interviews and reviews run in a variety of regional LGBTQ+ and mainstream publications and websites, Shapiro lives in South Florida with his husband Rick and their dog Coco.

Julianza (Julie) K. Shavin relocated from Atlanta, Georgia to Woodland Park, Colorado in 1993 on the advice of her doctor, has favorite words: elegie (spelled this way), solace, oasis, refuge, pilgrim and Mommy among them. A dedicated depressive, insomniac and chocoholic who has been called a poet of place, she recently completed an M.A. in Creative Writing; her thesis consisted of sixty video poems comprised of her poems, photography, other visual art and music (the last, mostly found, and attributed). The Pikes Peak Arts Council awarded her the Performance and Page Poet of the Year honors two years consecutively. Winner of the Mark Fischer Prize in 2016, in 2021 she merited 2nd prize in the National Federation of State Poetry Societies’ most prestigious single-poem contest, its Founder’s Award, along with 3rd in its four-poem BlackBerry Peach written/audio contest. An embarrassed, chagrined seven-time Pushcart nominee, her most recent of five books is Elusive Solace. New York-based spoken-word artist Hank Beukema has produced 29 of her poems, setting them to musical background. Self-flagellating with a poem-a-day practice for three years, she is Assistant Editor, Proofreader and Production Consultant for FutureCycle Press (Athens, GA), and lives in an under-lipsticked pig on an old dream of land in Fountain, Colorado with five rescue pets and a human partner-in-grime.

Jeffrey Spahr-Summers is a native of Colorado. He began exploring art mediums as a teenager while in South Africa during the 1970’s, quickly settling on photography and poetry. A commercial photographer in Chicago in the early 1990’s, he was active in the saloon poetry and publishing scene. Jeff’s poetry and photos have appeared in numerous print, online magazines and anthologies. He is the former publisher of Poetry Victims (2004 – 2014) and Snapping Twig (2013 – 2015) online magazines. He has published 19 books. He currently writes and publishes poetry, flash fiction, memoirs, and historical articles. Jeff is the founder of Cherry Publications, and Jasper’s Folly Poetry Journal.

Valerie A. Szarek is an award-winning performance Poet and Native American Flute player. Her poems are healing, present, political, and Shamanic, and cross between the seen and unseen worlds effortlessly. Her words, music and workshops are featured at festivals and events around Colorado, including the International Young Leadership conference, The Mercury Cafe, The Telluride Literary festival, and Ziggie’s Poetry Festivals. She was named “Poet of the Year” Blissfest, 2018. Other awards: Colorado Author’s League best poem 2020, 2021 and 2022 plus The National Poetry Federation Winner’s Circle Award 2016. Valerie offers “Writing as Ceremony” workshops monthly. She has been a leather artisan for 50 years and owns Breezy Mountain Leather as well as a Shamanic Practitioner and energy healer with a private practice. Bibliography: SOAR READY: MEDICINE POEMS FOR A CHANGING WORLD (2020) SIGNS OF LIFE (2015)

13 MOONS ON TURTLES BACK (2005)

David Williams was born deep down near the bottom of the Ethnocentric Gorge and grew up on the banks of the great Ethnocentric River just like everybody else who was ever temporarily alive.

Tom Zimmerman (he/him) teaches English, directs the Writing Center, and edits The Big Windows Review https://thebigwindowsreview.com/ at Washtenaw Community College, in Ann Arbor, Michigan. His poems have appeared recently in Pulsebeat Poetry Journal, Rough Diamond, and Sixpence Society. His latest book is the chapbook The House of Cerberus (Alien Buddha Press, 2022). Website: https:/thomaszimmerman.wordpress.com Twitter: @bwr_tom Instagram: tzman2012