Tipton Poetry Journal #40

Tipton Poetry Journal – Winter 2019

Tipton Poetry Journal – Winter 2019

Tipton Poetry Journal Editor’s Note Tipton Poetry Journal, located in the heartland of the Midwest, publishes quality poetry from Indiana and around the world.

This issue features 37 poets from the United States (17 different states) and 7 poets from India, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Palestine, Spain and Turkey.

Cover Photo: “Tattered” by Barry Harris Print versions of Tipton Poetry Journal are available for purchase through amazon.com.

Barry Harris, Editor MacKenzie Estrada, Assistant Editor

Copyright 2019 by the Tipton Poetry Journal.

All rights remain the exclusive property of the individual contributors and may not be used without their permission.

Tipton Poetry Journal is published by Brick Street Poetry Inc., a tax-exempt non-profit organization under IRS Code 501(c)(3).

Brick Street Poetry Inc. publishes the Tipton Poetry Journal, hosts the monthly poetry series Poetry on Brick Street and sponsors other poetry-related events.

Tipton Poetry Journal – Winter 2019

Contents Richard Schiffman...........................................................................1 Christopher Todd Anderson ........................................................2 Jenifer Cartland................................................................................4 Gershon Ben-Avraham ..................................................................6 Rosemary Freedman ......................................................................6 Marian Kaplun Shapiro.................................................................8 Ayse Teksen .......................................................................................8 Gene Twaronite .............................................................................11 Allan Johnston................................................................................12 Michael Pearce...............................................................................12 Jo Barbara Taylor.........................................................................14 Kai Edward Warmoth .................................................................16 EG Ted Davis ...................................................................................17 Laila Shikaki ...................................................................................18 William Aarnes ..............................................................................20 Matthew Brennan.........................................................................22 Stephen Campiglio........................................................................23 Holly Day..........................................................................................24 Simon Perchik ................................................................................26 Marc Swan.......................................................................................27 Mary Sexson....................................................................................28 Vincent Corsaro .............................................................................30 John Grey..........................................................................................31 Jeff Bernstein ..................................................................................32

Tipton Poetry Journal – Winter 2019 Xe M. Sánchez .................................................................................34 Lylanne Musselman .....................................................................36 Edward Lee......................................................................................37 Kathleen Latham ..........................................................................38 Andrew Szilvasy ............................................................................40 Alisha Erin Hillam.........................................................................41 Trivarna Hariharan.....................................................................42 R.E. Ford ...........................................................................................42 Diana Mercedy Howell ................................................................44 Lucas Jacob .....................................................................................45 Claire Keyes ....................................................................................46 Rodney Torreson...........................................................................48 Thomas O’Dore ..............................................................................50 Donna Pucciani..............................................................................52 Alessio Zanelli ................................................................................53 Review: this is still life by Tracy Mishkin..............................54 Contributor Biographies ............................................................60

Tipton Poetry Journal – Winter 2019

Tipton Poetry Journal – Winter 2019

Buddhist Snowman Richard Schiffman One must have a mind of winter To visit the Botanical Gardens in winter And not to come in out of the cold, But to sit alone on a bench in the late, pasty light Alone by a pond even the ducks have abandoned, Cattails lolling tongues of ice, Hoar frost on a wizened rose, And to feel no wonder for the fire of life still Flickering Below the surface Smoldering eyeless, hidden in the roots of things, Dozing fitfully through moons of heavy weather, Not even waiting for the spring, The now inconceivable Spring-- just sitting With the nothing that is not there, And the Nothing that is.

Richard Schiffman’s work has been published in the Southern Poetry Review, the Alaska Quarterly, the New Ohio Review, the Christian Science Monitor, the New York Times, Writer’s Almanac, Verse Daily, and many other publications.

His poetry collection What the Dust Doesn't Know was published by Salmon Poetry. He lives in New York City.

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Winter 2019

An Image of Our Times Christopher Todd Anderson In the field tongues sway like wheat.

Lithe and moist even in summer heat, they sprout pink from rich soil to fill acres of crop rows. Drive by on some country road, the noise deafens, a crass strange babble. Even from the highway, in low traffic, you’ll hear their eerie glottal murmur. In downpours, they lick and writhe, slick as rainworms, frenzied as sharks. In storms, they hunker down like red toads. When dawn arrives warm with promise, every tongue stretches toward the sun, slobbers and sings.

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Winter 2019

Chiclemechanotransmogriphobia, The Fear of Turning into a Gumball Machine

Christopher Todd Anderson Some days you sleep late and wake to kisses or slow rain. There is hot coffee and little to do. The children are still in bed, or you are alone, in the best chair.

On these days you call fear to you like a falcon to an unleathered wrist; you dredge anxiety from your veins and let it swirl, turbid, through your body.

Plant seeds of worry, invent things to dread: the fear that your fragile eyes are made of stained glass, or the fear of turning into a gumball machine.

Imagine your heart escaping its cage and flying into the night sky, a red crow; or bouncing helplessly down the sidewalk like a rubber ball toward a sewer grate.

When anxiety deserts you, darkness is not enough, nor sweat, nor thunder. Pull new terrors from your mind like nightworms writhing upward from twilight soil.

Christopher Todd Anderson is Associate Professor of English at Pittsburg State University in Kansas, where he teaches courses in American literature, poetry, environmental literature and film, and popular culture. A 2018 Pushcart Prize recipient (nominated by Tipton Poetry Journal), Anderson has published poetry in numerous national literary magazines, including River Styx, Crab Orchard Review, Prairie Schooner, Wisconsin Review, Tipton Poetry Journal, Tar River Poetry, Chicago Quarterly Review, and Greenboro Review, among others. Anderson has also published academic articles on images of garbage and waste in American poetry and on the film WALL-E.

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Winter 2019

What will happen when I am gone Jenifer Cartland As the sun sets day after day, you are left in the wild prairie, wind-whipped under winter ice, slow-baked under august heat and days will tumble forward as an ocean wrinkles to ever over hours and days.

I am a last vestige – a broken shed, over-run by storm, gentle weeds, rain-soaked breath.

God bless our time here.

God bless the time to come, when we fade and fade with only this small marker to be our companion.

The sun set last night in deep orange crowded over by dusty navy and I relived our nights on the road farm fields stretched out under orange-blue ghosts.

I bring them with me, splintered as I am, and spill all colors into new skies, stir a small place in my children’s minds for them to listen to, to live with on their dare, to spread arms out to heaven, to trip lightly with ghosts, sky, new born, ancient, as one.

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Winter 2019

We sustain the earth Jenifer Cartland Why is it a surprise to you that what we are stretches out of who we are – each as she is, in his own way – birthing forth our kingdom, our kingdom come?

There can be no other way except that we speak and make the world – each in his own terms, in her own manner – building up an ecosystem of rough grammars coming now.

Piled high upon these words made flesh, stone, river, tower and highway – each as she draws, as he imagines – layers build up, intermix, struggle for notice, many wishes in hiding still.

When you look back and wonder what we were – each with your own questions – prepare to see yourself, what you add in simply asking, and how we cannot become anything other than who you are.

Jenifer Cartland’s poems appear in The Wayfarer (Pushcart Prize nominee), Ribbons, NatureWriting, and on her blog (poemsfrominbetween.com). A group of poems stemming from her childhood experiences in western Michigan have been gathered into a self-published collection, Poems from Frenchtown. She is a native of Chicago and works in health care.

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Winter 2019

Mourning Wings Gershon Ben-Avraham She put her skirt on in darkness, then her blouse, sandals last— first the left, then the right. Rising, she gathered things, crossed the room, shut the door, leaving night behind her. She felt her way downstairs, one hand lightly brushing the wall, the day's burden shouldered. She made coffee. How she wished he had made it, then sat with her laughing, the way he used to do. She walked into her day, worked it bit by bit—first this thing, then that one, until done. Home again. Not hungry. Weary. She undressed in darkness, lay down, alone, her back hurting, near the shoulders.

She reached round to rub them. The pain would not leave her. In sleep, she dreamed she was flying. Wings on her shoulders. He was there, beside her, present, absent, mourning.

Gershon Ben-Avraham now lives in Israel. He earned an MA in philosophy (aesthetics) from Temple University in Philadelphia. His poems have appeared in Edison Literary Review, Poetica Magazine, Psaltery & Lyre, and San Pedro River Review, among others.

Triangle Shirtwaist Company Fire of 1911

Rosemary Freedman Uncle Henry walked from that day forward with a left leg drag, appearing like a stroke victim. Each night he lit the fire with quiet hesitation.

Never speaking of his injury, how each match strike brought him back. Each flicker carried him to the street where he had been landed on by a desperate 17 year old girl who had leapt from the 9th story window of the flame ridden Triangle Shirtwaist Company.

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Winter 2019 As he clasped her burning hair between hands he placed together as in prayer, he could only think of how she reminded him of his sister who had ran off at 16 never to be heard from again.

Being young himself this was the closest he’d ever been to a woman.

His mother never imagined the fear he had at burning the trash, or warming the house.

There were no articles written about his suffering, his instant love for this harsh featured delicate creature with elegant clavicles and hands that reached up to him battered from the sting of sewing needles.

How in that brief moment they shared an imagined lifetime.

And she, dying, looked into his eyes and spoke to him not with words but with foreign language.

A communication he recalls with every limp.

Rosemary Freedman is a poet, a painter and an advanced practice nurse. She has 7 children and lives in Carmel, Indiana with her husband Jack. Rosemary enjoys growing peonies and tending her large garden.

She is a graduate of Indiana University.

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Winter 2019

Home Marian Kaplun Shapiro House.

Door.

Floor. Ceiling. Wall. Roof. Window. Hall.

Plate. Spoon. Jug. Cup. Bowl.

Tub. Sink. Toilet.

Door.

House.

You. There.

You. Not there.

Marian Kaplun Shapiro, a Quaker and psychologist, lives and works in Lexington, Massachusetts. The author of a professional book a poetry book, and two chapbooks, she is a five-time Senior Poet Laureate of Massachusetts. She was nominated for the Pushcart Prize in 2012.

Easy Word Ayse Teksen Love: Easy word.

If you are not pensive Upon the killing of the skies And the stars among us, Hidden behind nothing But the truth of being and living.

Living and loving go together.

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Winter 2019 Or so I believe And slay the time That separates us In centuries and millenniums Created through the gates of fate, The ones especially you do not believe.

Belief and death are best friends.

Love is here, perhaps, Or will be tomorrow If you hold my hand forever And never say the word itself.

For the utterance is the death of the being— The being of us and time in your grace, Your eyes that pour meaning Minus the cruel affairs of the city.

Take me to a meadow And let’s gaze at the stars— Handful and big enough to catch The glimpse of the phrases Produced long before we were made.

We are late for the sun And the stars that have passed away Through a light of infinite time— Time it is, Time is ours.

Time is not easy.

What about love?

Is it easy?

Tell me.

Tell me and take me To the never lands of the skies.

The fairish seraphim of the hells Ended the youth of the names And the trees and the grass Wet with the tears of our joys And jarful memories.

I will be a memory for you And the earth, But you will stay here And there in the shiniest star Not detected yet By the weak human eye.

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Winter 2019 You will stay— Among us And the universe Sparkling above your charming head.

Your head will glow with truth, And the truth will be you one day.

Along with every thing And every being, Being the being Most certain of his existence, You will linger there— As the time and the now And the light And the dream and the eyes.

Be the bee against sugar, Be the scar against wound, Be the cure against the ill, Be the shine against gloom, Be the one against me and them, Be holy again and forever— The holy you I will worship early And kill eventually.

Ayşe Tekşen lives in Ankara, Turkey where she works as a research assistant at the Department of Foreign Language Education, Middle East Technical University. Her work has been included in Gravel, After the Pause, The Write Launch, Uut Poetry, The Fiction Pool, What Rough Beast, Scarlet Leaf Review, Seshat, Neologism Poetry Journal, Anapest, Red Weather, Ohio Edit, SWWIM Every Day, The Paragon Journal, Arcturus, Constellations, the Same, The Mystic Blue Review, Jaffat El Aqlam, Brickplight, Willow, Fearsome Critters, Susan, The Broke Bohemian, The Remembered Arts Journal, Terror House Magazine, Shoe Music Press, Havik: Las Positas College Anthology, Deep Overstock, Lavender Review, Voice of Eve, Dash, The Courtship of Winds, Mizmor Anthology, Mojave Heart Review, NōD Magazine, and Sincerely. Her work has also appeared or is forthcoming in Straylight, Toyon Literary Magazine, Headway Quarterly, Foliate Oak Literary Magazine, and Rabid Oak.

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Winter 2019

Flowering Means Nothing Gene Twaronite the horticulturist replied when I pointed to the flowers atop a crested saguaro I had tried to save, its life now oozing away from bacterial necrosis within.

But tell that to a bee who greets each flower she meets as if it were the first or to the Mexican bats who migrate a thousand miles to lap the sweet nectar from agave and saguaro blossoms or to the young woman whose first flowing blood marks the opening of her new life or to the young country where democracy once bloomed.

Gene Twaronite, who lives in Tucson, Arizona, is the author of seven books, including two short story collections and two juvenile fantasy novels. His second collection of poems, The Museum of Unwearable Shoes, was recently published by Kelsay Books. Visit his website at https://www.thetwaronitezone.com/

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Winter 2019

Sparrows Allan Johnston All is work and peck, work and peck; for these sparrows, the world is a feast, then suddenly, unexplainable flights sired by slight movements; they are enactments of neurosis, trauma yet living it they are cured in the feast of the world.

[This poem first appeared in Fogged Clarity] Allan Johnston has had work appear in Poetry, Poetry East, Rattle, Rhino, Weber Studies and more than forty other journals. Allan has received a Pushcart Prize Nomination and has published two books of poetry: Tasks of Survival (1996) , In a Window (2018) and three chapbooks. Allan teaches writing and literature at Columbia College and at DePaul University, both in Chicago.

Norm Michael Pearce The scars on his wrists came from a surgeon trying to fix the little ropes and pulleys inside so Norm could get on with the work that messed him up in the first place, which was replacing motors in aquaria which was fixing up exhibits that show how insects feed on rotten dead mice which was mucking out lab preps and cages and entering data and cutting and drilling aluminum and washing tempered glass.

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Winter 2019

He’s not a drinker but he sits on a barstool holding a beer with the fingers that did all that and more, whose calluses are the map of his life of work in the museum, thirty-five years, his only real job anywhere.

The museum, whose liberal leaders just laid him off, doesn’t need him now he’s older and damaged.

They can get younger and stronger and less damaged and get it for less money and shorter vacation time and then they won’t have a union activist either.

If you think this isn’t you then please check one and only one: you were born with a sturdy silver spoon that depressions can’t depress; you have lots of land and your own military to guard it; you do work that doesn’t require a body; you have a special deal with God; or you’re too young and too cool to care.

If this is you then maybe you remember that your body is you and work wears it down and your spirit is your body when it feels other bodies, their pain, their striving, their glory.

[This poem was first published in The Healing Muse]

Michael Pearce lives in Oakland, California. His poetry has appeared in The Threepenny Review, The Yale Review, Nimrod, New Ohio Review, Spillway, Water~Stone Review, and elsewhere, and has won several national prizes (New Ohio Review, Oberon, Dogwood, and others).

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Winter 2019

ee Jo Barbara Taylor i never understood the complexities of grammar—the ambiguities of subjects and objects, split in fin i tives, dangling dangles or how to tictoc time (tense making toctic difference) how commas go, reason for a colon, worse, semi colon and when to GO BIG or small am (bigu) ities. What came to me: the graceful use of (parentheses) like sconces casting fingers into rain (and even rain has small hands) i always understood words, nouns verb (verbs noun) rain sun moon stars ad jec tives underfoot like fall fallen leaves, their texture the color of countries words travel to and through a how pretty town, some stand up, others sit down a lark whispers in the dark voice of eyes, sound of salt (not shaking, but the bulk) the scent of mountains crouched in cloud—sentient ambiguities still, if i had understood intuitive indentation, the purposeful ante-cedent of pronoun, sub junc tive mood, i might have made a fine poet

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Winter 2019

Cowkeeping Jo Barbara Taylor Dust drifts through window screen, lays a caramel patina on every sill and in our summer-parched throats.

Mama at the ironing board, pulls dampened laundry from a bushel basket.

The iron hisses across each plaid shirt and milk-white sheet. She smokes Winstons, watches the Cards play ball on tv.

I color the Cinderella book, stay within the lines, cut out Betsy McCall and her dresses, empty the ashtray.

We like orange soda and peanuts.

Through the window we watch cows graze on grass and field stubble, drink from the claybed creek, sleep under trees.

The Holsteins segregate themselves from the Guernseys. Mothers bawl at the calves. Mornings, Trix the collie guides them to the barn where Dad sits on a three-legged stool, fills buckets with their bounty.

Jo Barbara Taylor grew up in Indiana and now lives outside of Raleigh, North Carolina. She leads poetry writing workshops through Duke Continuing Education, chairs the workshop committee for the North Carolina Poetry Society, and coordinates a poetry reading series for Quail Ridge Books in Raleigh. Of four poetry books, the most recent is How to Come and Go, published by Chatter House Press, 2016. Her fiction has appeared in the Tattoos anthology (Main Street Rag) and moonShine Review.

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Winter 2019

Thirty Years at Best Kai Edward Warmoth So let’s pretend it’s noticeable In the moment, that thine eyes Are able to swallow the dragon that Comes forth.

The West Antarctic Ice Sheet collapses: New York and all the other coastal pods, With their rude legions And their hostility to decency Disappear under a bulwark of water And Williamsburg becomes the Most Fashionable Place for algae (unfortunately not the kind with income) What then? What good is the gasping hands and the Working mouths of so-many Who said “teacher says it’s okay” While they walk you into a cell?

The flood plain may prattle and shake a bit, And we’ll surely talk about the pressure explosions Of eleventh story glass against tides That once felt their organs brush against The oars of Men Who Would Find a New World While we stroll down midwestern gravel roads, Hoping the fresh air will tire out the children, Put their head so full with dreams Of sprinting through fields without fences, Like the God of the Old. Anything so they succumb to sleep And leave us to entwine our bodies In that spiral that never flinched.

We may lament the rust done to Broadway, But I do not think it will put us off from making love As the cicadas and the crickets churn ever onward.

Kai Edward Warmoth is an Indianapolis-based poet and musician. Growing up working class and having never gone to college, he's very used to his work being scoffed at by debt-laden liberal arts majors. He's a regular contributor to Terror House Magazine and ExPat Lit.

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Winter 2019

Mr. Roboto @ the Jordan EG Ted Davis Mr Roboto, o-rings, silicone seals, your every part, supposedly waterproof.

Nothing seeps in, nothing oozes out.

John says come, he knows not who, or what you are, but you're in his time, in his territory, LED lights glowing red, where there appears to be eye sockets, in John's mind, mind youin John's time Multicolored lights, blink simultaneously on a band around your breast.

He knows not what you are made of, and from what middle eastern region you are from.

He ponders if the Romans have created a new species of a fighting man.

Come, John invites, come.

Dip yourself into the mighty Jordan, let angels ascend and say that glory awaits, let no man, or woman hesitate, not even yourself, whoever, whatever, you are.

Be baptized, let redemption come.

EG Ted Davis is a semi-retiree who resides in Boise, Idaho and has written poetry since back in the 80's with work appearing in various online literary journals and websites in the US and the UK.

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Winter 2019

I Miss Home the Most Laila Shikaki I miss home the most when I get sick I ache with my body as my heart seeks comfort around it nothing embraces me but the tears that fall my brother would’ve made me a sandwich pickles for a nose, cucumbers for eyes, and a tomato slice for a smile he would laugh at his baby sister “pretending” to be sick my mother would call me Lulu she would sit next to me in bed I would extend my arms and ask her to stay more but mama always had other things to do she would still check on me every hour or two I miss home the most when I can’t breathe at night I put my hand on my heart to hear its beats I am still... breathing... it is... still...beating even if I felt it breaking last night on the phone with my friend it’s a girl she says her second. I have yet to meet her first I miss home the most when I get a bad grade I used to say that there are other things that are more important than grades: family, my friends, and Arabic food but these are lacking as I sit on my bed drinking green tea with a creased paper that has a red B in fourth grade, I used to tell my dad about my math grades I would sneak into his office downstairs, asking for his signature It’s the fourth highest grade in the class, I would say honestly he would laugh. We have to eventually tell your mama, he would say now, I tell neither one of them I just stare at my grade and think of who t o tell how to explain my weakness, how to justify the hate I feel from that professor who thinks I want to change the American way or the other one who thinks Zionism is okay I miss home the most when I remember that I don’t need to justify anything to anybody

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Winter 2019 when I remember that I am here on my own in my own apartment in my school in whatever clothes I choose to wear yet I find myself the same me the person in jeans trying to match her hijab with the patterns on her shirt the girl who has a thin skin with scars that are about to peel I miss home the most when I write in poems about the smell of the streets near the Falafel shops old women in white shawls I miss home the most right now while I write this, and while you read it when you read this and while I write it I miss Ramallah I miss Tulkarem where I grew up, and I miss Nablus where I learned about love I miss Gaza although I haven’t seen it in years I miss Jerusalem although it aches me when I am allowed to visit I miss him and her and them and us I miss me there I miss home the most when I hold a pen

Laila Shikaki is a 31 year old poet from Palestine. At the age of 6 she decided that she would grow up to be a teacher.

At the age of 26 she realized that poetry was her calling. Receiving her M.F.A from Chapman University, California, Laila realized coming back home and having taught at Birzeit University that both of her dreams came true. Laila is now pursuing a Ph.D in English Literature at St. John's University in New York City. She started in Sept, 2016.

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Winter 2019

Gunplay William Aarnes

gunpowder rounds packed with smokeless gunpowder gunshots, gunshots guns blasting from cars driving by guns emptied into cars pulling away handguns, shotguns (guns maybe named after someone called Domina Gunnhildra, both gunnr and hildr meaning war) submachineguns gun practice at gun ranges, about-to-be riddled targets depicting a burly expert killer aiming his gun gunsmiths, gun shops, gun shows gun owners, gun collectors gun cabinets and gun racks gunrunners on the interstates gunned-down divorcĂŠes, their bodies and the bodies of their children gurneyed to ambulances, fugitive ex-husbands, exchanging multiple rounds with pursuing officers, gunned-down gun-toting voters gun-loving politicians gun laws guarding gun rights gunfire in classrooms gunmen in churches gunshots, gunshots, gunshots

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Winter 2019

Final William Aarnes A mother wakes one weekday morning. Never return. she chants, never return never return never return . . . .

She looks out at the birdfeeder, and the sparrows fly off, some less hurried than others—and don’t return.

For the first time in their lives the hounds leap the picket fence—and don’t return.

She calls her parents to leave a message that says she knows it’s one they’ll never return.

The dogs nowhere to be found, her husband kisses her goodbye and hurries off late for work—never, she knows, to return.

She hugs her son and daughter extra tight, and their rides pick them up for school—never to return.

Her supervisor texts, wondering where she is; she thumbs back that she’s quit and won’t return.

Midmorning the mailman somehow appears at her door with slacks she needn’t have ordered—and will never return.

She drives through the nearly empty streets of downtown, all the merchants having locked up—never to return.

Now, the tank still half full, she’s doing ninety down the throughway—spellbound, never to return.

William Aarnes lives in South Carolina. He has published poems in such magazines as in FIELD, The Southern Review, Tipton Poetry Journal and Poetry. His third collection, Do in Dour, came out in 2016.

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Winter 2019

Two Views of San Francisco Matthew Brennan 1 Last time we came here, the fourth floor revealed a view commensurate to the wine I drank: the high sky shed its clouds, as if exposing skin as soft as glossy Chinese silk.

Before our eyes, a seagull glided building to building in great windswept surges destined for the bay. We watched a woman on a rooftop watch the same bird begin to blur, then merge into the cool but luminous air.

2 This time we are not here to see the sights: your fading vision needs an optic fix; a tricky laser surgery has brought us back. Your blurry world is closing in, fog blotting out the high-rise lofts across Van Ness and whiting out the next blocks' hills.

All's sober now, like boats tied up in harbor.

We wait to see if afternoon burns off the fog, brings back the seagulls into view.

Matthew Brennan retired from teaching at Indiana State University. His fifth book of poems is One Life (Lamar University Literary Press, 2016). Earlier books include The House with the Mansard Roof (Backwaters Press, 2009) and The Sea-Crossing of Saint Brendan (Birch Brook Press, 2008). Recent poems have appeared in Blue Unicorn, The Hardy Review, POEM, and Westview.

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Winter 2019

Visiting Hours Stephen Campiglio I’m standing outside a hospital room, and am also inside that room with a team of doctors. Outside the room, unsure as to whether I’m the double or the original, I converse with one of the nurses.

Although I can’t see around the door jamb and into the room, I know that I’m also on the bed and that doctors are examining me.

The nurse outside the room explains to me the dismal results of my blood test and that I will die soon.

The news alleviates the burden of having to listen to the specialists who attend to me on the bed inside the room, the foregone conclusion undercutting the drama.

I say to the nurse, whom I find attractive, “If we ever encounter each other again after we die— in whatever form or time that may be— and based upon your impression of me now, would you be attracted to me then?”

Before she can respond, the two of me abruptly collapse into one again, the sick person on the bed, yet I can still hear her voice from outside the room. Was I talking to someone else all along, or is this her answer to me, trailing after my ghostly departure?

Stephen Campiglio founded and directs the Mishi-maya-gat Spoken Word & Music Series at Manchester Community College in Connecticut. His poems and translations have appeared or are forthcoming in Aji Magazine, City Works Journal, Ekphrasis, The Evansville Review, Gradiva (Florence, Italy), Italian Americana, Journal of Italian Translation, The Massachusetts Review, Miramar, Natural Bridge, Ping-Pong, Poetry Daily, Skidrow Penthouse, TAB: The Journal of Poetry & Poetics, VIA: Voices in Italian Americana, and The Worcester Review. Winner of the Willis Barnstone Translation Prize for his translation of a poem by Italian writer, Giuseppe Bonaviri (1924-2009), he has now completed a book-length manuscript of translations on the author, The Ringing Bones: Selected Poems of Giuseppe Bonaviri. Nominated for two Pushcart Prizes, Campiglio has published two chapbooks, Cross-Fluence (2012) and Verbal Clouds through Various Magritte Skies (2014).

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Winter 2019

Frankie Holly Day I’m not going to say his name, but he was in pain I could tell he was in pain even though I couldn’t see his eyes through his sunglasses, didn’t register the limp until he moved.

There was a wave of anger and pain every time he sighed most of the time I thought it was directed at me.

There are birds inside all of us struggling to break free in poetry, or song, or through bright swaths of paint some of us have stronger birds inside of us than those of other people, and while that sounds magical and wonderful, it’s not. It’s better to be filled with sparrows that will never find the strength to rip free than to be filled with creatures vital enough to be felt all of the time, powerful enough to break through one’s skin and fly free at any given moment leaving nothing but the hollowed-out shell of a shattered human being in their wake.

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Winter 2019

True Holly Day There are things you can do to make time stretch longer standing on mountaintops, searching for eagles following the footsteps of a fox through the snow pulling weeds out of the garden in search for cherry tomatoes carefully pulling free an abandoned bird’s nest for contemplative research listening to the breath of the person sitting silent beside you.

These are all activities that can slow time to a crawl put weight and breadth on a day, stretch hours like warm taffy.

There are things you can do to make time go by quickly.

There are too many things that can make the days fly by unhindered by importance and reflection. I tell you we can live forever if we just stop doing these stupid, time-sucking things but you don’t want to understand.

Holly Day’s poetry has recently appeared in The Cape Rock, New Ohio Review, and Gargoyle. Her nonfiction publications include Music Theory for Dummies, Music Composition for Dummies, Guitar All-in-One for Dummies, Piano and Keyboard All-in-One for Dummies, Walking Twin Cities, Nordeast Minneapolis: A History, and Stillwater, Minnesota: A History. Her newest poetry collections, A Perfect Day for Semaphore (Finishing Line Press), I'm in a Place Where Reason Went Missing (Main Street Rag Publishing Co.), In This Place, She Is Her Own (Vegetarian Alcoholic Press), and A Wall to Protect Your Eyes (Pski’s Porch Publishing) and The Yellow Dot of a Daisy (Alien Buddha Press). Holly lives in Minneapolis.

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Winter 2019

* Simon Perchik How many times! this doorbell smelling your sweat must know nothing’s changed and the dry sleep through the night –the button has forgotten how, curls up with someone who isn’t there though this all-at-once-familiar nudge can’t keep you away, outside it’s still rain and darkness always some touch pressing down a somewhere note, half embraced half pounded, by itself heads into the constant fear it’s her name that falls from the night sky with no help in remembering –for years! you don’t first knock sure this door will bring it down leave only the earthquake and walls.

Simon Perchik is an attorney whose poems have appeared in Partisan Review, Forge, Poetry, Osiris, The New Yorker and elsewhere. He lives on Long Island, New York. His most recent collection is The Osiris Poems published by boxofchalk, 2017. For more information including free e-books and his essay “Magic, Illusion and Other Realities” please visit his website at www.simonperchik.com. To view one of his interviews please follow this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MSK774rtfx8

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Winter 2019

Trap Line Marc Swan On a stretch of warm sand along a rocky shore now littered with jellyfish, many belly up baking in thirty-two degrees Celsius, I have dance stepped between rolling waves in the surf cooling down, watching for stingers as a couple approach. Patricia with her bathing suit straps undone, heaving breasts catching midday sun; Brian shirtless, broad face, warm smile. We chat as if we always meet on this deserted beach on the Acadian coast with PEI looming eight miles away. Before the next waves begin their roll, we talk of the weather climate changing before our eyes. As a kid he ran trap lines after the first freeze then all winter long now the snow falls before the ice forms. Subject rises, drops with a thud on our government— a topic on everyone's mind it seems.

They are liberals and almost as tired as we are of the media coverage, though he does find humor in the late night shows.

I agree, but add it isn't so funny anymore.

Talk turns darker. The day seems to agree that magnificent sun clouds overhead, rain falls in large thick drops covering our bodies, making the jellyfish squirm in their own unimaginable dance.

Marc Swan’s poems have recently been published in Atlanta Review, Gargoyle, Mojave River Review, Chiron Review, among others. today can take your breath away, his fourth collection, was published in 2018 by Sheila-na-gig Editions. He lives with his wife Dd in Freeport, Maine.

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Winter 2019

What Was Left Mary Sexson How much we can remember was never the question, only how fast we could walk away from the shifting plates, seismic then, with jagged edges that tore at the heart of our memories, making it impossible to tell the whole truth about what happened, or even who was there.

We are the only witnesses, now tasked with this telling in songs and poems and stories, burdened, really, to recount what we saw, whose arms held us, and why they let us go.

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Winter 2019

We Stood, Empty Mary Sexson Everything back there is burned and gone, no longer able to record any songs, no verses to rhyme or words to etch in stone.

We stood, empty finally, drained of the notion we were there to tell the story no one else could remember.

We sat at your doorstep, just beyond the avenue and puzzled over how we would move forward under our own impetus, memory the driving force after all, reason enough to change the outcome and give shape to another state of being, the one where we got on with our lives, shed our old skin, were sane enough to vow never to look back.

Mary Sexson is the author of 103 in the Light, Selected Poems 1996-2000 (Restoration Press), and co-author of Company of Women, New and Selected Poems (Chatter House Press). Her poetry has appeared in The Flying Island, Tipton Poetry Journal, Hoosier Lit, New Verse News, and others, and several anthologies, including Reckless Writing (2013), A Few Good Words (2013), The Best of Flying Island (2015), and Words and Other Wild Things (2016).

Her newest work is in The Flying Island (2019). She was a part of the Da Vinci Pursuit, a poetry project at Prophetstown State Park.

Find her at Poetry Sisters, on Facebook.

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Winter 2019

The Geology of You Vincent Corsaro I want to be deep inside of you with my spade-like hands, digging, unearthing your minerals and their secrets like what can grow, what reaches for sunlight with yearning arms and what will be choked with weeds.

I want to get lost in the granite of your history what years of bones and sediment left behind crushed into sand and stone and powder and perfume.

I want to see your fossils, what skinny bodies marbleized clutching dolls and pans and axes like the statues left behind ex-lovers frozen forever in the fire-stormed valley of Pompeii.

I want to feel the warmth of your mantle your lava pulse through veins magma filled with passion, streaming through the underbelly of your world, blood made of burning fire.

I want to travel so far into your depths that my ears pop.

I want to feel your gravity hug me, pull me deeper and press my face with pebbles and cool shards of rock.

Most of all, I want to see your core which holds together continents and oceans that constantly move and reshape the essence of you.

It will take me years to study you, to dissect and label each chunk of stone and mud that together form a golem with life’s breath a creature from clay that can love and hold someone like me for so long.

Vincent Corsaro is an MFA student at Butler University in Indianapolis.. He’s had fiction appear in the Canvas Literary Arts Journal, fiction forthcoming in The New Limestone Review, and has had multiple poems in publications like The Flying Island and Tipton Poetry Journal. He is an avid rock climber, musician, writer, and, most importantly, person.

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Winter 2019

A Farmer to His Child John Grey I see the eyes of your grandfather's ghost every time you ask where does the food come from? empty eyes like flapping fading posters he placed a gun against his head and pulled the trigger but that's not where the food comes from – it's all conglomerates now - mechanical locusts chewing up the old ways - running on science and size where does the food come from? from foreclosures - from the myth of the pioneer from the kind of memory only a bank manager could love from a blood-red moon, spiteful winds, a bullock skull in the sand – so eat up - you want to be big and strong, don't you? this will all be yours someday when the time comes, you'll need something to aim at

John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident. Recently published in the Homestead Review, Poetry East and Columbia Review with work upcoming in Harpur Palate, the Hawaii Review and North Dakota Quarterly. John lives in Rhode Island.

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Winter 2019

The Paint Job Jeff Bernstein The painter announced he was ready for the assault on our brown farmhouse the day before he arrived, just lee of Memorial Day. My wife and I looked long at each other, figured might as well let him start, not dreaming he’d be as much a part of our summer as that apocryphal relative who wouldn’t leave.

When we first bought our farmhouse we discovered we had friends we didn’t know, some we’d never liked, they gave us a list of weekends they were free, said they preferred skiing outside of public-school vacation week because the crowds were just so annoying.

We never saw them back in the city so why would we want them as weekend guests?

Course, as my mother used to say back in the day, that painter was one swell guy, if you didn’t mind a twenty-minute conversation every time you headed out to walk the dogs or run an errand. He was a built-in friend who was always there. Some people think marriage is supposed to be like that, never worry about a Saturday night date again.

His approach to the house defied reason.

Western gable ridge (who knew we had a western gable ridge) on Friday morning?

The skyward sides go a bit gray first, like the subtle suggestions in my beard a couple of decades past, then blossom like some Hitchcock fog in a movie except you didn’t worry what would come next.

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Winter 2019 Sometimes he’d run out of paint. It happens to everyone but he shyly confessed that he had no money. I’d just given him a check so couldn’t figure out how that boat was still in the harbor until he told me that the I.R.S. had liened his bank account.

I had no choice but to ask why.

There are places you don’t want to go, but the question draws you in the way cars slow to look at an accident on the side of the highway, leaving a sluggish wake behind. I knew there was no choice but to withhold judgment, give him some advice about getting back on the beam and wondered about people who just bar the door at bad news, hide, think it can’t find them under the covers.

After all, we did have an ulterior motive to see the job conclude, much as we liked him.

There was a theoretical end – it had to end, didn’t it?

We doubted it sometimes, we really did.

I reminded myself that no matter how deep the lows things usually get better except in the case of endings but even under daily attack you are amazed at what you can get used to.

The house’s now a lovely rich gray, Prussian undertones with red and gold leaves for a frame.

A lifelong New Englander, Jeff Bernstein divides his time between Boston and Central Vermont. Poetry is his favorite and earliest art form (he can’t draw a whit or hold a tune). He would most have liked to have been, like Thoreau, “an inspector of snow-storms and rain-storms… [a] surveyor, if not of highways, then of forest paths and all across-lot routes.” Recent poems have appeared, or will shortly, in, among others, Allegro Poetry Magazine, Best Indie Lit New England, The Centrifugal Eye, Cooweescoowee, Edison Literary Review, The Kerf, The Midwest Quarterly, Mulberry Fork Review, Paper Nautilus, Pinyon, Plum Tree Tavern, Reckless Writing Poetry Anthology, Rockhurst Review, Silkworm and Third Wednesday. He is the author of two chapbooks; his full-length collection Nightfall, Full of Light was published in December 2017 by Turning Point. His writer's blog is at www.hurricanelodge.com.

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Winter 2019

Povisa Xe M. Sánchez Dizse que delles estrelles qu’agüeyamos nel cielu pela nueche yá nun esisten.

Quiciabes poro los homes inventaren la poesía, que comu nos, tamién ye povisa, povisa d’estrelles.

De xemes en cuandu talanto que cuantu más pescanciamos el nuesu mundiu, mayor ye la nuesa incertidume.

La sabencia -esa ye la gran paradoxaenxamás fexo más sabios a los homes.

[This poem is written in the Asturian language.

Its English translation appears on the next page]

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Winter 2019

Dust Xe M. Sánchez It is said that some stars that we see in the sky at the night no longer exist.

That’s why, perhaps, men have invented poetry, which is also dust, like us, star dust.

Sometimes I think that the more we understand our world, the more will be our incertitude.

Wisdom -that is the great paradoxnever has made men more wise.

[Translated from the Asturian language.]

Xe M. Sánchez was born in 1970 in Grau (Asturies, Spain). He received his Ph.D. degree in History from the University of Oviedo in 2016. He is an anthropologist and he also studied Tourism and three masters. He has published seven books in Asturian language and several publications in journals and reviews in Asturies, USA, Portugal, France, Sweden, Scotland, Australia, South Africa, India, Italy, England and Canada.

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Winter 2019

Each Day Lylanne Musselman She doesn’t think she needs anyone to stay with her, to take care of her – make sure she eats, make sure she takes meds at the right time, the right dosage, make sure she doesn’t fall as she toddles down the hallway like a two-year-old with her walker.

She gets mad when told “you can’t stay alone.”

Each day, she gets crankier and glares at me as if I’m her arch enemy.

Me, her only child, who put my freedom on hold to keep her free from the fate of the nursing home she dreads. She argues she’s “just fine…” as she repeats herself every five minutes; as she accuses me of “stealing” her mail, of being “mean” to her; as she mockingly calls me “mom” for reminding her to do mundane things; as she forgets the birthdays of those she loves, as she attempts to change TV channels with the mobile phone, and wonders why it isn’t working.

Lylanne Musselman is an award-winning poet, playwright, and artist, living in Indiana. Her work has appeared in Pank, Flying Island, Tipton Poetry Journal, The New Verse News, and Ekphrastic Review, among others, and many anthologies.

Musselman is the author of five chapbooks, a coauthored volume of poetry, Company of Women New and Selected Poems, and a full-length poetry collection, It’s Not Love, Unfortunately (Chatter House Press, 2018).

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Winter 2019

The Key Edward Lee The pin that dropped and woke all the angels of hell, is missing.

A great reward has been promised for its return, safe or otherwise.

No one knows what the reward is, nor who is offering it.

Some questions are best not asked because they might be answered, and no one wants answers anymore in this collapsing world.

They simply want the pin that dropped, the pin I found and now hide in my wallet beside old bus tickets and my out of date I.D.

Edward Lee’s poetry, short stories, non-fiction and photography have been published in magazines in Ireland, England and America, including The Stinging Fly, Skylight 47, Acumen and Smiths Knoll. Edward lives in Ireland. His debut poetry collection Playing Poohsticks On Ha'Penny Bridge was published in 2010.

He is currently working towards a second collection. He also makes musical noise under the names Ayahuasca Collective, Lewis Milne, Orson Carroll, Blinded Architect, Lego Figures Fighting, and Pale Blond Boy. His Facebook page can be found at www.facebook.com/edwardleewriter.

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Winter 2019

All New Images Kathleen Latham I confess to Googling you on occasion, but unless you are an overweight bagpipe player or twenty-year-old hipster with neck tattoos and a bolo tie, I don’t think I’ve found you.

It’s possible, of course, that I stumbled across you a long time ago but failed to pick you out of the cyber line-up. I have little to go on but memory and a scattering of yearbook photos and in these you are ageless, smooth-faced and muscular, down on one knee in your baseball uniform or rigid and posed in the blazer you borrowed from your older brother.

For all I know, you’re on my screen right now staring out at me from the results page: middle-aged and gray, pudgy around the collar, waving your virtual arms—I’m here, I’m here— invisible in your failure to live up to memory.

And what of me? Is it my name you slip into that long, narrow box on nights when yearning and melancholy slink across your desk like restless cats, knocking things over and demanding attention? Would you know me still?

Or are you still searching for that girl from the past, the one who knew exactly where she was going and so easily left you to get there?

Maybe we come across each other every day and don’t realize it. We just keep missing the connection, chasing link after link, seeking a spark of recognition that went out years ago.

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Winter 2019

Multiverse Kathleen Latham If you had stayed, would we argue about your lousy friends, find fault in each other’s choices, ride in silence through a thick, black night while we imagined lives that waited elsewhere?

Or would there be happiness— dancing barefoot in the kitchen, front-porch-swing kind of happiness?

Would every sun rise upon the two of us entangled in white sheets and certainty?

In memory, you’re tapping out a rhythm on the steering wheel: mid-verse, mid-song. If only I could reach across and make you stop, place my hand over yours and tell you what’s coming.

But synchronous time is still merciless time and even as I hear you see you feel you drum that wordless beat we are hurtling forward and I can’t go back and all at once I am here, in the life that waited in the dark beyond. I am elsewhere, and you are gone.

In another world, the two of us shoot onward into the night.

Kathleen Latham’s work has most recently found a home in Flash Fiction Magazine, Picaroon Poetry, and The London Reader and is forthcoming in the Crack the Spine Anthology.

Kathleen lives in Massachusetts and can be found online at KathleenLatham.com.

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Winter 2019

Mysteries Andrew Szilvasy God, I hated Pan so much I had the metal hand of my invented god Metalican spring from a meadow and crush his stupid goaty face. My myth exulted in the noise of violence: his screams and the crack of his eye sockets figured prominently. Typical middle school gore.

But I miss Pan now—his mysteries where the emanations of a god unburdened by the hair and teeth, give us no pride of place: all bleed into One. What was it in that ancient kykeon? I’ve tasted only wine—good, mind you, but after the communion and the darkness, no Elysian Fields, only the sabachthani and a pounding head that hates the sun.

[This poem first appeared in Loch Raven Review]

Andrew Szilvasy teaches British Literature outside of Boston, and has poems appearing or forthcoming in CutBank, Smartish Pace, Barrow Street, and Permafrost, among others. He lives in Boston with his wife. When not reading or writing, he spends his time running, brewing beer, and coaching basketball.

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Winter 2019

Petition Alisha Erin Hillam

1926, Weaning farm, Washington Township, Clinton County Indiana

The stove isn’t burning; the air is burning.

I think you want to believe that I will come to myself.

I watched you at the pump this morning, pouring cool water into the white basin.

When I woke, I felt your empty place next to my sweaty, tangled sheets in the bed.

The children are on their way to the creek, laughing and swinging pails, to look for black raspberries.

How can I tell you I wake up and can’t breathe, I can’t move with this weight on my chest, can’t find the man that I was.

Can’t you kick at the darkness?

Can’t you come find me?

Plant something in this emptiness to grow and bring me back to you all.

Alisha Erin Hillam’s work has appeared in such publications as TAB, Architrave Press, Prick of the Spindle, Midwestern Gothic, Passages North, and Crab Orchard Review. She is the recipient of several literary awards from Purdue University and is a Best of the Net nominee. Originally from Indiana, she currently resides in Massachusetts with her family.

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Winter 2019

Flowering Trivarna Hariharan Breath by breath— a peony opens itself up to the joy of being alive.

Sonata Trivarna Hariharan Listening to our river’s old flow— I make peace with myself.

Trivarna Hariharan is a student of English Literature from India. She has authored There Was Once A River Here (Les Editions du Zaporogue), and Letters I Never Sent (Writers Workshop, Kolkata). Her poems appear or are forthcoming from Right Hand Pointing, Noble/Gas Quarterly, Entropy, Third Wednesday, Otoliths, Sweet Tree Review, Across the Margin, and others. In October 2017, Calamus Journal nominated her poem for a Pushcart Prize. She has served as an editor-in-chief at Inklette, and a poetry editor for Corner Club Press.

Reevaluations R.E. Ford I turned to crime pleading you can’t steal; God owns everything.

Revelations bringing the sacred wine to waste.

I was not good; I was good at it.

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Winter 2019

Desire was revered.

It always slows when I empty my mind into the holy water that situates deep within me.

I’m not there; I’m gone.

Amongst misfortune— here I go now under the surface.

The anchor broke.

Four winds were moving too fast to embrace.

Blind Bible, Deaf Torah, Mute Quran— they methodically lead the world into consecrated wars of baffled design.

We must not take life seriously; we must reevaluate our values.

R E. Ford lives in Brownsburg, Indiana. His poetry has appeared in Haggard and Halloo, The Flying Island, Ivy Tech’s New Voices, and others. He has three books available on Amazon: Justified Dreaminess (2017), The Humility of Three Carvers (2018), and Dancing with Strangers (2019).

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Winter 2019

Amber Autumn Afternoon Diana Mercedy Howell Amber autumn afternoon Adagio to reckless June Gradually, fall snips away The green, the grass, the summer hay Surrender to her tenderly Her twilight days Her dwindling light Wrap yourself in her harvest And dream inside her warm cocoon For too soon...winter.

Diana Mercedy Howell lives near Seattle with her Chiweenie, Poppy. Writing and songwriting have been lifelong hobbies. Now retired, a second writing career is in full bloom. You can find her works in Northwest Prime Time Magazine, The Woodinville Patch, and Lara’s Den. She's currently finishing her first novel.

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Winter 2019

On Route 7, Just South of Dupont, Indiana

Lucas Jacob One of my students is reading tarot cards: This is your future, she says, nodding and fourteen years old. The bus bounces south; a voice several rows back says, You want to marry her? That is so second grade!

My thoughts are another voice in the din, phonetic for concentration: Eye ree-red uh frends ledder last nite, and pome. Strength, passion, and success, the fortuneteller says— All of this awaits you in your future!

We are on Route 7; there is a hawk; I look for its shadow in the fields, fallow and stark, washed into the November sky.

My friend’s lines, too, are a wash: I see, instead, her smile beneath her nose like a bird’s.

It has been barely a year; she has married and moved away—what have I forgotten?

My student pokes my shoulder, holds a card to my face. With insistence she says, This is your future, and smiles: Not your past!

The card pulled away, I look up and smile back.

I re-read a friend’s letter last night and poem.

Lucas Jacob’s poetry and prose have appeared or are forthcoming in journals including Southwest Review, Barrow Street, Hopkins Review, and Valparaiso Poetry Review. His first full-length poetry collection, a finalist for Eyewear Publishing’s Beverly Prize, will be published by Eyewear in 2019. In 2015 his chapbook A Hole in the Light was published by Anchor & Plume Press. Lucas lives in Indianapolis.

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Winter 2019

His Touch Claire Keyes I want to create drawings which touch some people.

- Vincent Van Gogh

So he experimented by aiming his gaze at an old pair of boots, well-scuffed, laces like reins flung to the ground, the horse spent.

Are we touched by the dirt roads those boots have trod? By the tiredness of those laces? Another day, to pull us in, he’d stare for hours into the mirror to capture his homely self gazing back, manly and open.

He appears to look you in the eye, head aslant under a straw hat as if to ask: did you go for a walk in the sun today?

Were there haystacks? ladders propped against their bristly yellow roundness?

Am I bristly? Not everyone thinks so.

Here’s the postman posing for him in a splendid blue uniform with gold buttons, gold brocade saying ship’s captain, voyager of the seas, eyes level as truth, enviable geometric beard.

No one around to pose? He enlists a chair positioned like a throne on the bedroom tiles, its rush seat an altar for his pipe, his dusky handkerchief.

And then he signs “Vincent” on the cupboard, in case you’ve missed his signals and want to reply, to tell him he’s touched you.

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Winter 2019

Tea, Please Claire Keyes after Lu Yu, The Sage of Tea

Any occasion was reason for tea. At breakfast, with toast and jam, the kids’ cups cloudy with milk, thick with sugar. With cupcakes, winter afternoons, joining Mom and Aunt Jo in the kitchen, the bakery box slick with frosting, the floor gathering the crumbs of our haste and desire. For troubles, it was always tea.

A bruised shin, a cup of tea. My sister married a sailor.

She was barely eighteen. He had red hair, a crooked grin.

Here, mom, a cup of tea. Aunt Jo taken by the cancer whose name we never spoke, my mother keening for her dead sister that day I came home and found her slumped against the wall, tears coursing down her cheeks. Did I do anything kind or human that day? Like offer her some tea? I’d like to think so.

Being Irish, we thought it best not to make too much of mere emotion.

That’s why her grief inhabits me and I read Lu Yu’s meditations.

The sage asserts that tea can find the sore places and soothe, its aroma rising like a mist out of a ravine. Maybe so, her sobs held back for the moment, the cup at her lips: a lovely brew wet and soft like a fine earth newly sown.

Claire Keyes is the author of The Question of Rapture from Mayapple Press and the chapbook, Rising and Falling. A second book of poems, What Diamonds Can Do, was published in 2015 by Cherry Grove Collections. Her poems and reviews have appeared in Literary Bohemian, Sugar Mule, Innisfree Poetry Journal, Persimmon Tree, Comstock Review and on NPR’s The Writer’s Almanac. She is Professor emerita at Salem State University and lives in Marblehead, Massachusetts.

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Winter 2019

Karla Could Ply a Smile from a Storm Cloud, Get the Sunlight to Flap Its Wings

Rodney Torreson “She’s attractive as those girls on Lawrence Welk,” my mother whispered that Friday Karla drove down from New America to meet me at my parents’ home.

When she buzzed the doorbell, it couldn’t match the buzz inside the house.

For, yes, she looked like one of those pretty maids all in a row on my parents’ program.

All weekend, the galaxy spun. With Karla I noticed sunlight on the silverware as we ate our muffins and jam at the kitchen window, and how enticing was the small explosion of dice as we played Monopoly with the family, and afterward walked over where the Dairy Queen crowd was out, then to the alfalfa field on the edge of town where we parted the bristles and found the sweet spots.

To complicate Sunday, under the Lindon tree, smiling her honeysuckle cheeks, “If you’re serious about me,” Karla said, “I will not quit my teaching job at the end of the school year and move back to Portland.”

She gazed into my eyes and pursed her lips like she wished me to attend to them, kiss the lipstick off her wheelhouse.

But before I could, she ripped a piece of sky as she confessed she never thought she’d fall for someone who wasn’t handsome. I recovered quickly: she should hold out for someone good-looking, hold to her childhood dream.

And I, too, should wait for someone who finds my appearance pleasing.

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Winter 2019 The electric wires were tense. They ran down my shoulders, arms, into my wrists.

There’d been other guys, two I’d seen

walk her arm-in-arm to her dorm.

And before that, her parents hadn’t locked her up in her room and kept her doorknob till she turned 18.

I didn’t kiss her all the way back from her car. No French kiss with our tongues in the hunt for us. I couldn’t wait for her to take a page from the wind and be gone.

I looked at Karla through a yawn, a fake one that told her to move on.

In the summer, at my mailbox, her letter shared what she’d done for a new guy she met.

I mulled strange things, like how intimate slivers are.

In the fall when the school year came around, I was okay with the ironclad fog.

The poet laureate of Grand Rapids, Michigan from 2007-2010, Rodney Torreson is the author of four books. A fifth book of poems, co-authored with Russell Thorburn and forthcoming from Finishing Line Press, is entitled The Jukebox Was the Jury of their Love. In addition, Torreson has poems soon to appear in Artful Dodge, Canary, Comstock Review, Miramar, Negative Capability and Poet Lore.

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Winter 2019

I Heard the Owl Thomas O’Dore I could barely write this my crimped penmanship wouldn’t stay on ruled lines my body was haggard as was my mind an owl was close by his voice hoarse and hollow resonated thru the dark who…who-who-who…who Amerinds have a legend that when you’re soon to die an owl will call to you last night I heard the owl he was calling to me you…you-you-you…you he paused… often several minutes then repeated his message you…you-you-you…you to warn the reaper was coming for me…me-me-me…me

? Again Thomas O’Dore it’s been difficult these past three years to say something

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Winter 2019 positive about America …but I’ll try ? make \ America \ great \ again that’s assuming America had and lost a greatness which in turn raises questions ? what was this greatness ? how was it gained ? how long did it last ? how was it lost that’s two and a half centuries that one must research to unearth those cardinal points by various interpreters clouded of actions noble and scurrilous before making such a case I want to know / someone tell me ? how far we must recede into our checkered past to find the zenith and the cusp precipitating this (assumed) fall I don’t think anyone can because there hasn’t been one there have been many because the greatness of America a ship of state at sea is not found at some wave crest and lost in some wave trough but in its ability to ride out storms upright itself again and sail always forward anyway \ we can’t reset history as a sea anchor against change or future storms will swamp us

Guys like Tom O’Dore do not have biographies.

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Winter 2019

Winter’s Measure Donna Pucciani This is my answer to the blinking lights of holidays, to a neon star that bends the night in two, the relics of ribbons folded into the darkening sky: The usual cards from far-off places are my anti-theology.

They bring news from surviving spouses, the details of death sprinkled like sugar on a tray of sweets. When tragedies insist on happening, there’s nothing to be done except make soup for a sick neighbor, water windowsill plants for the folks across the street who in yesterday’s blizzard escaped to Florida.

Impossible to celebrate, retrieve the past, raise the dead.

The new year pulls us forward in a one-horse open sleigh.

Only the ghosts of birds and fish have perfected the art of death.

Look carefully at their wings and fins.

Take down the lights.

Donna Pucciani, a Chicago-based writer, has published poetry worldwide in such diverse publications as Shi Chao Poetry, Istanbul Literary Review, Poetry Salzburg, The Pedestal, and Journal of Italian Translation. Her most recent book of poems is EDGES.

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Winter 2019

I Am Alessio Zanelli Inquiring myself about what makes me be is not a proper way to state I am. I am if I am what I am. There is no other way to be.

And I am in absence, in detachment from the world, or whatever I think it is.

The less I see, hear, smell, taste and touch, in other words the less I feel, the more I am. I am the purest, uncorrupted, undiluted, uncompromising me.

Absolute shape. Naked thought. All and only what really is, stripped of what is not although I think it is. As such I cannot be ascertained from anywhere by anybody outside of me. I am. That’s it.

Alessio Zanelli is an Italian poet who writes in English and whose work has appeared in over 150 journals from 13 countries. His fifth original collection, titled The Secret Of Archery, will be published in 2019 by Greenwich Exchange (London). For more information please visit www.alessiozanelli.it.

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Winter 2019 Review: this is still life by Tracy Mishkin

Reviewed by Barry Harris Title: this is still life Author: Tracy Mishkin Publication Date: September 18, 2018 Publisher: Brain Mill Press

Tracy Mishkin’s chapbook, this is still life, began as her MFA thesis at Butler University. It was published in 2018 as part of the Mineral Point Poetry Series by Brain Mill Press.

This selection of poems is an exercise in exorcising the demons of the malaise that grips the world many of us find ourselves living in today. It is not a preachment advocating turning our gloom instantly into sunshine like turning on a magic tap. It is more an illustration of how our endurance of hard and difficult things is itself an act of courage.

The first poem in her chapbook, “The Ire Barn,” pulls the curtain back to invite us in – with a warning: I don’t want to go inside. It smells of dark and heat and rotting grass. Here a man can hold the trigger and spill. Smash the gas pedal and kill. All this red, like a vine tightening on my neck…

The token embrace that doesn’t stop the hate.

I think this place goes on forever, I don’t want to go inside, but I’m already here.

You and I probably don’t want to go inside either. But we do.

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Winter 2019 There are a few poems that talk about America and what has happened to us. In “When the Corpse Flowers Bloom,” we are reminded that: … It’s the summer of our last Presidential election, of finding out how long we can hold our breath, how much is more than we can take.”

In “America, You Make Me Nervous,” the poet is unequivocal: You turn like a meat wheel full of teeth.

A third of your people believe only Christians are truly American I have considered jumping ship….

America, I’m sewing twenties into my dresses. America, take a good look at yourself.

But it is not just America, it is also personal. In “The Deadweight Machine,” we are introduced to the tension of personal relationship.

As if a tectonic shift has dumped a mountain on his chest, my husband slumps in the easy chair.

Five weeks until the homeowners insurance drops us, stacks of useful junk around the yard.

The deadweight machine measures how you hold up against tension and comprehension…

Every time I think of leaving, he catches a death rattle in my car, stops the house from flooding, sweet-talks a raccoon out the kitchen door.

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Winter 2019 And in “What Work Isn’t”: … I yank weeds, snatch black plastic mats, and load the wheelbarrow again. Sweat spatters my glasses.

When rain comes, I slog on. Junk limps into the dumpster – bricks and rakes and bones the dog has long abandoned.

When I ask for help, you say the grass is wet and you are wearing sandals. Your asthma is acting up.

You fell asleep on the couch. You late and lazy bastard. I should throw you in that dumpster, change the locks, and make love to the silence.

But the title poem, “This Is Still Life,” strikes a hopeful note: … I should have split when I first saw his apartment, crammed with power tools and old TVs. Barely space to sleep.

But we weren’t sleeping, we were burning.

Falling. More room in my heart for crazy than I knew.

In one of several fine prose poems in the chapbook, “End of the World, Part I,” the author describes a shared litany of accommodations: Though the gutters ran with the waters of Prozac, it was not nearly enough. We stayed at jobs we never should have taken. In marriages of stale convenience. We avoided the eyes of friends. Thought we’d gotten used to catcalls, to being ridiculed or ignored.

In another prose poem, “After Setbacks, We Go Sideways,” I sense the author painting a prescription of hope. The title itself seems to refer back to the final line of “When the Corpse Flowers Bloom,” where she writes: “…. Summer of undertow. / We swim parallel to shore, as we were taught.” It made me wonder if going sideways in times of staggering troubles is a metaphor for enduring courage. …We’ve lost the stone head. The old man on the three-wheeled bicycle shouts that courage is a broken rake still gathering leaves. The flat sandstone face stood two hundred years. Until graffiti on the covered bridge. Until slurs on the church. We catch our breath, find healing goldfish in the middle of obligation and the clock. Somewhere, the stone head endures. At night, we nestle in a drawer of odd socks, a ray of yes in a world of no.

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Winter 2019

In “Vision Problem,” the author talks about how we see the fault in others: Retinal floater drifting like a jellyfish. Doctor says come back if it’s worse….

If it was his fault because he didn’t bring a gun to church. Her fault whites were outnumbered at the pool. If he looked like he had a gun. Played with a toy gun. Slept in the wrong house.

In the wrong neighborhood. If six foot four, three hundred pounds.

Mentally ill. Asthma. Accent.

If walking in the street.

On the sidewalk.

If he ran.

To me, the final lines of “Courage,” seem to sum up this chapbook succinctly: I’m a nail, yes. But you don’t always have to be a hammer, world.

The chapbook, this is still life, consists of poetry subjects that are admittedly difficult for readers to face head on – yet delivered through poems that are beautiful, companionable and humanizing.

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Winter 2019

Tracy Mishkin is a call center veteran with a PhD and a graduate of the MFA program in creative writing at Butler University. She is the author of two previous chapbooks, I Almost Didn’t Make it to McDonald’s (Finishing Line Press, 2014) and The Night I Quit Flossing (Five Oaks Press, 2016). She has been nominated twice for a Pushcart and published in Raleigh Review, Milk Journal, Wabash Watershed, and Rat’s Ass Review.

Barry Harris is editor of the Tipton Poetry Journal and two anthologies by Brick Street Poetry: Mapping the Muse: A Bicentennial Look at Indiana Poetry and Words and Other Wild Things. He has published one poetry collection, Something At The Center.

Barry lives in Brownsburg, Indiana and is retired from Eli Lilly and Company.

His poetry has appeared in Kentucky Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Grey Sparrow, Silk Road Review, Saint Ann‘s Review, Boston Literary Magazine, Night Train, Silver Birch Press, Flying Island, Awaken Consciousness, Writers‘ Bloc, and RedHeaded Stepchild.

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Winter 2019

The Editors Editor Barry Harris is editor of the Tipton Poetry Journal and two anthologies by Brick Street Poetry: Mapping the Muse: A Bicentennial Look at Indiana Poetry and Words and Other Wild Things. He has published one poetry collection, Something At The Center.

Barry lives in Brownsburg, Indiana and is retired from Eli Lilly and Company. His poetry has appeared in Kentucky Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Grey Sparrow, Silk Road Review, Saint Ann‘s Review, Boston Literary Magazine, Night Train, Silver Birch Press, Flying Island, Awaken Consciousness, Writers‘ Bloc, and Red-Headed Stepchild. One of his poems was on display at the National Museum of Sport and another is painted on a barn in Boone County, Indiana as part of Brick Street Poetry‘s Word Hunger public art project. His poems are also included in these anthologies: From the Edge of the Prairie; Motif 3: All the Livelong Day; and Twin Muses: Art and Poetry.

Assistant Editor MacKenzie Estrada is the assistant editor of the Tipton Poetry Journal as well as on staff for Etchings Literary and Fine Arts Magazine. She is a junior at the University of Indianapolis studying Professional Writing, and hopes to one day become a book editor.

Although she loves Indiana, she hopes to one day broaden her horizons in English and travel to bigger cities to edit. MacKenzie spends most of her time teaching dance, which has been apart of her life since birth, reading as many books as she possibly can, and loving on as many animals as she is allowed. She has found a love for poetry in college and loves being a part of the Tipton Poetry Journal.

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Winter 2019

Contributor Biographies William Aarnes lives in South Carolina. He has published poems in such magazines as in FIELD, The Southern Review, Tipton Poetry Journal and Poetry. His third collection, Do in Dour, came out in 2016.

Christopher Todd Anderson is Associate Professor of English at Pittsburg State University in Kansas, where he teaches courses in American literature, poetry, environmental literature and film, and popular culture. A 2018 Pushcart Prize recipient (nominated by Tipton Poetry Journal), Anderson has published poetry in numerous national literary magazines, including River Styx, Crab Orchard Review, Prairie Schooner, Wisconsin Review, Tipton Poetry Journal, Tar River Poetry, Chicago Quarterly Review, and Greenboro Review, among others. Anderson has also published academic articles on images of garbage and waste in American poetry and on the film WALL-E. Gershon Ben-Avraham now lives in Israel. He earned an MA in philosophy (aesthetics) from Temple University in Philadelphia. His poems have appeared in Edison Literary Review, Poetica Magazine, Psaltery & Lyre, and San Pedro River Review, among others.

A lifelong New Englander, Jeff Bernstein divides his time between Boston and Central Vermont. Poetry is his favorite and earliest art form (he can’t draw a whit or hold a tune). He would most have liked to have been, like Thoreau, “an inspector of snow-storms and rain-storms… [a] surveyor, if not of highways, then of forest paths and all across-lot routes.” Recent poems have appeared, or will shortly, in, among others, Allegro Poetry Magazine, Best Indie Lit New England, The Centrifugal Eye, Cooweescoowee, Edison Literary Review, The Kerf, The Midwest Quarterly, Mulberry Fork Review, Paper Nautilus, Pinyon, Plum Tree Tavern, Reckless Writing Poetry Anthology, Rockhurst Review, Silkworm and Third Wednesday. He is the author of two chapbooks; his full-length collection Nightfall, Full of Light was published in December 2017 by Turning Point. His writer's blog is at www.hurricanelodge.com.

Matthew Brennan retired from teaching at Indiana State University. His fifth book of poems is One Life (Lamar University Literary Press, 2016). Earlier books include The House with the Mansard Roof (Backwaters Press, 2009) and The Sea-Crossing of Saint Brendan (Birch Brook Press, 2008). Recent poems have appeared in Blue Unicorn, The Hardy Review, POEM, and Westview.

R E. Ford lives in Brownsburg, Indiana. His poetry has appeared in Haggard and Halloo, The Flying Island, Ivy Tech’s New Voices, and others. He has three books available on Amazon: Justified Dreaminess (2017), The Humility of Three Carvers (2018), and Dancing with Strangers (2019).

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Winter 2019 Stephen Campiglio founded and directs the Mishi-maya-gat Spoken Word & Music Series at Manchester Community College in Connecticut. His poems and translations have appeared or are forthcoming in Aji Magazine, City Works Journal, Ekphrasis, The Evansville Review, Gradiva (Florence, Italy), Italian Americana, Journal of Italian Translation, The Massachusetts Review, Miramar, Natural Bridge, Ping-Pong, Poetry Daily, Skidrow Penthouse, TAB: The Journal of Poetry & Poetics, VIA: Voices in Italian Americana, and The Worcester Review. Winner of the Willis Barnstone Translation Prize for his translation of a poem by Italian writer, Giuseppe Bonaviri (1924-2009), he has now completed a book-length manuscript of translations on the author, The Ringing Bones: Selected Poems of Giuseppe Bonaviri. Nominated for two Pushcart Prizes, Campiglio has published two chapbooks, Cross-Fluence (2012) and Verbal Clouds through Various Magritte Skies (2014).

Jenifer Cartland’s poems appear in The Wayfarer (Pushcart Prize nominee), Ribbons, NatureWriting, and on her blog (poemsfrominbetween.com). A group of poems stemming from her childhood experiences in western Michigan have been gathered into a self-published collection, Poems from Frenchtown. She is a native of Chicago and works in health care.

Vincent Corsaro is an MFA student at Butler University in Indianapolis.. He’s had fiction appear in the Canvas Literary Arts Journal, fiction forthcoming in The New Limestone Review, and has had multiple poems in publications like The Flying Island and Tipton Poetry Journal. He is an avid rock climber, musician, writer, and, most importantly, person.

EG Ted Davis is a semi-retiree who resides in Boise, Idaho and has written poetry since back in the 80's with work appearing in various online literary journals and websites in the US and the UK. Holly Day’s poetry has recently appeared in The Cape Rock, New Ohio Review, and Gargoyle. Her nonfiction publications include Music Theory for Dummies, Music Composition for Dummies, Guitar All-in-One for Dummies, Piano and Keyboard All-in-One for Dummies, Walking Twin Cities, Nordeast Minneapolis: A History, and Stillwater, Minnesota: A History. Her newest poetry collections, A Perfect Day for Semaphore (Finishing Line Press), I'm in a Place Where Reason Went Missing (Main Street Rag Publishing Co.), In This Place, She Is Her Own (Vegetarian Alcoholic Press), and A Wall to Protect Your Eyes (Pski’s Porch Publishing) and The Yellow Dot of a Daisy (Alien Buddha Press). Holly lives in Minneapolis.

Rosemary Freedman is a poet, a painter and an advanced practice nurse. She has 7 children and lives in Carmel, Indiana with her husband Jack. Rosemary enjoys growing peonies and tending her large garden. She is a graduate of Indiana University.

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Winter 2019 John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident. Recently published in the Homestead Review, Poetry East and Columbia Review with work upcoming in Harpur Palate, the Hawaii Review and North Dakota Quarterly. John lives in Rhode Island.

Trivarna Hariharan is a student of English Literature from India. She has authored There Was Once A River Here (Les Editions du Zaporogue), and Letters I Never Sent (Writers Workshop, Kolkata). Her poems appear or are forthcoming from Right Hand Pointing, Noble/Gas Quarterly, Entropy, Third Wednesday, Otoliths, Sweet Tree Review, Across the Margin, and others. In October 2017, Calamus Journal nominated her poem for a Pushcart Prize. She has served as an editor-in-chief at Inklette, and a poetry editor for Corner Club Press.

Diana Mercedy Howell lives near Seattle with her Chiweenie, Poppy. Writing and songwriting have been lifelong hobbies. Now retired, a second writing career is in full bloom. You can find her works in Northwest Prime Time Magazine, The Woodinville Patch, and Lara’s Den. She's currently finishing her first novel.

Claire Keyes is the author of The Question of Rapture from Mayapple Press and the chapbook, Rising and Falling. A second book of poems, What Diamonds Can Do, was published in 2015 by Cherry Grove Collections. Her poems and reviews have appeared in Literary Bohemian, Sugar Mule, Innisfree Poetry Journal, Persimmon Tree, Comstock Review and on NPR’s The Writer’s Almanac. She is Professor emerita at Salem State University and lives in Marblehead, Massachusetts.

Lucas Jacob’s poetry and prose have appeared or are forthcoming in journals including Southwest Review, Barrow Street, Hopkins Review, and Valparaiso Poetry Review. His first full-length poetry collection, a finalist for Eyewear Publishing’s Beverly Prize, will be published by Eyewear in 2019. In 2015 his chapbook A Hole in the Light was published by Anchor & Plume Press. Lucas lives in Indianapolis.

Allan Johnston has had work appear in Poetry, Poetry East, Rattle, Rhino, Weber Studies and more than forty other journals. Allan has received a Pushcart Prize Nomination and has published two books of poetry: Tasks of Survival (1996) , In a Window (2018) and three chapbooks. Allan teaches writing and literature at Columbia College and at DePaul University, both in Chicago.

Kathleen Latham’s work has most recently found a home in Flash Fiction Magazine, Picaroon Poetry, and The London Reader and is forthcoming in the Crack the Spine Anthology. Kathleen lives in Massachusetts and can be found online at KathleenLatham.com.

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Winter 2019 Edward Lee’s poetry, short stories, non-fiction and photography have been published in magazines in Ireland, England and America, including The Stinging Fly, Skylight 47, Acumen and Smiths Knoll. Edward lives in Ireland. His debut poetry collection Playing Poohsticks On Ha'Penny Bridge was published in 2010.

He is currently working towards a second collection. He also makes musical noise under the names Ayahuasca Collective, Lewis Milne, Orson Carroll, Blinded Architect, Lego Figures Fighting, and Pale Blond Boy. His Facebook page can be found at www.facebook.com/edwardleewriter.

Lylanne Musselman is an award-winning poet, playwright, and artist, living in Indiana. Her work has appeared in Pank, Flying Island, Tipton Poetry Journal, The New Verse News, and Ekphrastic Review, among others, and many anthologies. Musselman is the author of five chapbooks, a co-authored volume of poetry, Company of Women New and Selected Poems, and a full-length poetry collection, It’s Not Love, Unfortunately (Chatter House Press, 2018).

Guys like Tom O’Dore do not have biographies.

Michael Pearce lives in Oakland, California. His poetry has appeared in The Threepenny Review, The Yale Review, Nimrod, New Ohio Review, Spillway, Water~Stone Review, and elsewhere, and has won several national prizes (New Ohio Review, Oberon, Dogwood, and others).

Simon Perchik is an attorney whose poems have appeared in Partisan Review, Forge, Poetry, Osiris, The New Yorker and elsewhere. His most recent collection is The Osiris Poems published by boxofchalk, 2017. He lives on Long Island, New York. For more informationluding free e-books and his essay “Magic, Illusion and Other Realities” please visit his website at www.simonperchik.com. To view one of his interviews please follow this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MSK774rtfx8 Donna Pucciani, a Chicago-based writer, has published poetry worldwide in such diverse publications as Shi Chao Poetry, Istanbul Literary Review, Poetry Salzburg, The Pedestal, and Journal of Italian Translation. Her most recent book of poems is EDGES. Xe M. Sánchez was born in 1970 in Grau (Asturies, Spain). He received his Ph.D. degree in History from the University of Oviedo in 2016. He is an anthropologist and he also studied Tourism and three masters. He has published seven books in Asturian language and several publications in journals and reviews in Asturies, USA, Portugal, France, Sweden, Scotland, Australia, South Africa, India, Italy, England and Canada.

Richard Schiffman’s work has been published in the Southern Poetry Review, the Alaska Quarterly, the New Ohio Review, the Christian Science Monitor, the New York Times, Writer’s Almanac, Verse Daily, and many other publications.

His poetry collection What the Dust Doesn't Know was published by Salmon Poetry. He lives in New York City.

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Winter 2019 Mary Sexson is the author of 103 in the Light, Selected Poems 1996-2000 (Restoration Press), and co-author of Company of Women, New and Selected Poems (Chatter House Press). Her poetry has appeared in The Flying Island, Tipton Poetry Journal, Hoosier Lit, New Verse News, and others, and several anthologies, including Reckless Writing (2013), A Few Good Words (2013), The Best of Flying Island (2015), and Words and Other Wild Things (2016). Her newest work is in The Flying Island (2019). She was a part of the Da Vinci Pursuit, a poetry project at Prophetstown State Park. Find her at Poetry Sisters, on Facebook.

Laila Shikaki is a 31 year old poet from Palestine. At the age of 6 she decided that she would grow up to be a teacher. At the age of 26 she realized that poetry was her calling. Receiving her M.F.A from Chapman University, California, Laila realized coming back home and having taught at Birzeit University that both of her dreams came true. Laila is now pursuing a Ph.D in English Literature at St. John's University in New York City. She started in Sept, 2016.

Marian Kaplun Shapiro, a Quaker and psychologist, lives and works in Lexington, Massachusetts. The author of a professional book a poetry book, and two chapbooks, she is a five-time Senior Poet Laureate of Massachusetts.

She was nominated for the Pushcart Prize in 2012.

Marc Swan’s poems have recently been published in Atlanta Review, Gargoyle, Mojave River Review, Chiron Review, among others. today can take your breath away, his fourth collection, was published in 2018 by Sheila-na-gig Editions. He lives with his wife Dd in Freeport, Maine.

Jo Barbara Taylor grew up in Indiana and now lives outside of Raleigh, North Carolina. She leads poetry writing workshops through Duke Continuing Education, chairs the workshop committee for the North Carolina Poetry Society, and coordinates a poetry reading series for Quail Ridge Books in Raleigh. Of four poetry books, the most recent is How to Come and Go, published by Chatter House Press, 2016. Her fiction has appeared in the Tattoos anthology (Main Street Rag) and moonShine Review.

Ayşe Tekşen lives in Ankara, Turkey where she works as a research assistant at the Department of Foreign Language Education, Middle East Technical University. Her work has been included in Gravel, After the Pause, The Write Launch, Uut Poetry, The Fiction Pool, What Rough Beast, Scarlet Leaf Review, Seshat, Neologism Poetry Journal, Anapest, Red Weather, Ohio Edit, SWWIM Every Day, The Paragon Journal, Arcturus, Constellations, the Same, The Mystic Blue Review, Jaffat El Aqlam, Brickplight, Willow, Fearsome Critters, Susan, The Broke Bohemian, The Remembered Arts Journal, Terror House Magazine, Shoe Music Press, Havik: Las Positas College Anthology, Deep Overstock, Lavender Review, Voice of Eve, Dash, The Courtship of Winds, Mizmor Anthology, Mojave Heart Review, NōD Magazine, and Sincerely. Her work has also appeared or is forthcoming in Straylight, Toyon Literary Magazine, Headway Quarterly, Foliate Oak Literary Magazine, and Rabid Oak.

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Winter 2019 The poet laureate of Grand Rapids, Michigan from 2007-2010, Rodney Torreson is the author of four books. A fifth book of poems, co-authored with Russell Thorburn and forthcoming from Finishing Line Press, is entitled The Jukebox Was the Jury of their Love. In addition, Torreson has poems soon to appear in Artful Dodge, Canary, Comstock Review, Miramar, Negative Capability and Poet Lore.

Gene Twaronite, who lives in Tucson, Arizona, is the author of seven books, including two short story collections and two juvenile fantasy novels. His second collection of poems, The Museum of Unwearable Shoes, was recently published

by Kelsay Books. Visit his website at https://www.thetwaronitezone.com/ Kai Edward Warmoth is an Indianapolis-based poet and musician. Growing up working class and having never gone to college, he's very used to his work being scoffed at by debt-laden liberal arts majors. He's a regular contributor to Terror House Magazine and ExPat Lit. Alessio Zanelli is an Italian poet who writes in English and whose work has appeared in over 150 journals from 13 countries. His fifth original collection, titled The Secret Of Archery, will be published in 2019 by Greenwich Exchange (London). For more information

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