Tipton Poetry Journal #46 - Fall 2020

Tipton Poetry Journal – Fall 2020

Tipton Poetry Journal – Fall 2020

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 40 poets from the United States (17 different states) and 5 poets from Australia, Ireland, Italy, Nigeria and Ukraine.

Our Featured Poem this issue is “Secrets” written by Claire Scott.

Claire’s poem, which also receives an award of $25, can be found on page 3. The featured poem was chosen by the Board of Directors of Brick Street Poetry, Inc., the Indiana non-profit organization who publishes Tipton Poetry Journal.

Joyce Brinkman reviews Norbert Krapf’s Southwest by Midwest.

Cover Photo: “Maple Flame” by Joyce Brinkman.

Print versions of Tipton Poetry Journal are available for purchase through amazon.com.

Barry Harris, Editor

Copyright 2020 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 taxexempt 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 – Fall 2020

Contents Mary Redman ............................................................................................. 1 Claire Scott .................................................................................................. 2 William Greenway .................................................................................... 4 Julie L. Moore .............................................................................................. 6 Claire Keyes ............................................................................................... 10 Liz Dolan .................................................................................................... 12 Gene Twaronite ....................................................................................... 13 Jeanine Stevens ........................................................................................ 14 Penelope Scambly Schott ...................................................................... 15 Tom Raithel ............................................................................................... 18 Holly Day .................................................................................................... 19 Jennifer M. Phillips ................................................................................. 20 Yuliia Vereta ............................................................................................. 22 Nancy Kay Peterson ............................................................................... 23 George Korolog ........................................................................................ 24 Paul Daniel Lee ........................................................................................ 25 Janet Jiahui Wu ........................................................................................ 25 DS Maolalai ............................................................................................... 26 Richard Luftig .......................................................................................... 27 John Cardwell ........................................................................................... 28 Cindy Buchanan ....................................................................................... 30 Madelyn Camrud ..................................................................................... 31 Lukpata Lomba ........................................................................................ 32 Luke Daugherty ....................................................................................... 34 Jane Attanucci .......................................................................................... 35 Gary Barkow ............................................................................................. 36

Tipton Poetry Journal – Fall 2020 Carol Hamilton ......................................................................................... 37 Will Schmit ................................................................................................ 38 Timothy Martin ........................................................................................ 40 Alessio Zanelli .......................................................................................... 41 Michael McManus ................................................................................... 42 Terry Savoie .............................................................................................. 43 Frederick Michaels ................................................................................. 44 Carol Tyx .................................................................................................... 45 Cameron Morse ........................................................................................ 46 James K. Zimmerman ............................................................................ 47 Andrew Hubbard ..................................................................................... 48 R. Nikolas Macioci ................................................................................... 49 Kenneth Pobo ........................................................................................... 50 Dave Malone ............................................................................................. 51 Review: Southwest by Midwest by Norbert Krapf ....... 52 Contributor Biographies ...................................................................... 57

Tipton Poetry Journal – Fall 2020

Tipton Poetry Journal – Fall 2020

The Aftermath Mary Redman Late October chilled the car, and I drew figure-eights on the passenger side window through fog of breath.

The funeral was over. Empty evening gaped like a yawn ‘til a neighbor asked if I’d like to go to meet some friends. She drove.

I was charmed by her idle chatter, by how she never said a word about the bitter business of today: my father lowered into earth. Inside our favorite restaurant, fluorescent light pierced darkness.

The jukebox played Good Vibrations and vied with voices celebrating the night’s football win.

A girl we knew shared gossip — my gloom faded like a dream I’d recall once I awoke.

Days later, I was startled to see a picture someone took of me that night, smiling while a shadow, like some sharpened blade, sliced my face in two.

Mary Redman is a retired high school English teacher who currently works part time supervising student teachers for University of Indianapolis. She has had poems published in Flying Island, Red River Review, Tipton Poetry Journal, Snapdragon: A Journal of Healing, Kaleidoscope, and elsewhere. One of her poems received a Pushcart nomination in 2019.

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Fall 2020

Sheltered in Place Claire Scott Three months at home with kids glued to devices and I haven’t done a single Monumental Thing such as painting the living room where my toddler Magic Markered the walls, but I am sure they are Masterpieces and any day now the Guggenheim will offer millions for her scrawl.

I haven’t done a single Minor Thing such as clean the hall closet, but when I open the door the scramble of towels, screwdrivers, board games, Nerf darts, flashlights, odd socks and tennis balls stares at me reproachfully and I gobble a pile of Ativan or chug a pint of gin.

What I have managed to do is gain fourteen pounds grow my hair into a perfect Brillo pad and watch all 684 episodes of The Simpsons while managing to ignore the school emails with unintelligible instructions on how to teach quadrilaterals and long division.

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Fall 2020

Secrets Claire Scott You never told me what the doctor said I assumed the tests were negative no cancer, no foreshortened future so when I answered the door this morning a bit annoyed since it was before six and I was wearing my seen-better-days robe there was a grizzled man with a seaweed oar bandy legs, briny hair saucer eyes gleaming salt water dripping demanding a silver coin I said we gave at the office and shut the door his sea smell lingered Later I saw you take a coin from your mouth and set it on the counter while you flossed and brushed terror knifed my heart, I reached for your hand afraid we won’t grow old together hear the cries of grandchildren catching fire flies in mason jars as summer’s shadows spread we will never invite the lot of them to Disney Land for a crazy, exhausting, exasperating, amazing, wonderful week I never told you about the visitor hoping he would find another man to ferry across

Claire Scott is an award winning poet in Oakland, California who has received multiple Pushcart Prize nominations. Her work has been accepted by the Atlanta Review, Bellevue Literary Review, New Ohio Review, Enizagam and Healing Muse among others. Claire is the author of Waiting to be Called and Until I Couldn’t. She is the co-author of Unfolding in Light: A Sisters’ Journey in Photography and Poetry.

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Fall 2020

The Ghosts of Christmas Passed William Greenway It was me they passed in Walmart this morning, first my grandfather, stooped, gray, and ball-capped, his jaw working back and forth as if chewing a cud, or trying to speak.

Then a jingling carol overhead summoned my sister, her name that year dying of a brain tumor, and then there was my whole family, the dead, a flock of them, wandering the aisles, ignoring me, squinting instead at the shelves as if searching for something more important.

Then even the living became ghosts too, and I was surrounded and all alone, until I looked down at my own hand now clear as glass.

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Fall 2020

Back Then William Greenway when I woke each morning to a whisper of surf, just a tint of the coming dawn, saltwater warm to my waist, gulls diving, fish biting, a hotdog for lunch with lemonade on the porch, where I napped in a hammock while the sun painted the surf from azure to aqua, then the lime of margaritas till time to boil the shrimp, then troll the shallows, and stroll the beach as the day prismed into the starry, palm-fronded dark.

Did I know that was heaven back then, back when I was alive?

William Greenway’s Selected Poems was the Poetry Book of the Year Award winner from FutureCycle Press, and his tenth collection, Everywhere at Once, won the Poetry Book of the Year Award from the Ohio Library Association, as did his eighth collection Ascending Order. Publications include Poetry, American Poetry Review, Southern Review, Missouri Review, Georgia Review, Southern Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, Poetry Northwest, and Shenandoah. Greenway is Distinguished Professor of English Emeritus at Youngstown State University, and now lives in Ephrata, Pennsylvania.

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Fall 2020

The Color White Julie L. Moore In Grant County, . . . [t]he color white was so ordinary that it was not really perceived as a color; only black was a color, the one that always was marked, seen, and noted. ~James H. Madison, A Lynching in the Heartland: Race and Memory in America [B]efore the crowd could hang me, a voice rose above the deafening roar of the mob. . . . It was a feminine voice, sweet, clear, but unlike anything I had ever heard. . . . I do not pretend to understand why this occurred. For even though I clearly heard the voice, no one else in the mob heard it! ~James Cameron, the only known person in American history to survive a lynch mob

I know my Bible. I know stealin’s a sin.

And murder’s ten times worse. I know rape’s a sin, too, and when it’s a Negro with a woman like me, it’s doubly so. The paper said Mary was engaged to Claude, so I believed her story. What with the market crash, who had a dime to spare? And why in the Sam Hill kill Claude?

Three unpardonable sins, if you ask me, and coloreds to hold to account. Those boys wasn’t no saints.

They was regular thieves. I wasn’t no racist, I tell you that much.

I didn’t use those profane names. I was a good Christian woman raisin’ my children right. I knew men in the Klan.

They was everywhere. Sheriff Campbell was one. It wasn’t no secret.

You couldn’t get elected without, you know, bein’ connected.

But I had nothin’ to do with them or their kerosene crosses.

They didn’t lynch people often. What I mean is, this wasn’t no Mississippi.

This was Indiana. And it was 1930. We was ordinary folk.

Yes, I went to the town square that night.

It was August and so hot, flies licked our sweat and hordes of gnats raged above our heads.

I looked into the eyes of my husband and didn’t recognize him no more. Didn’t recognize my neighbors neither.

I got swept up in it, I admit. There was thousands of us, you know.

It wasn’t possible for me to walk the other way. I never seen the ocean, but I think it was like one of them big tidal waves pushin’ with all its might to flood a city, takin’ bodies with it. I mean, it was go or drown, I tell you. I wanted the kids to stay put, I really did, but it wasn’t no use. Everyone went.

Wasn’t like I could hire a sitter. I told them to bring a toy, keep their heads down.

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Fall 2020 When I got there, I saw Lawrence with his big, ol’ camera.

I wasn’t sure how I felt about that. Like takin’ a photo of a body in a casket—kinda morbid.

And he was my weddin’ photographer. Just turned my stomach. I didn’t say nothin’, though.

I didn’t say a word to anyone else neither.

Wasn’t no time, you know? It all happened so fast.

Everyone’s phones ringin’ all day—my friend Irene called me— the right terrible story buildin’ like steam in a kettle.

They confessed, and our courts ain’t the best.

So there we was. Some woman was shoutin’, Get in there and get ’em! Get in there and get ’em!

Tommy was first. Some woman jumped from the roof of a Ford coupe in her high heels, screamin’ cuss words I never say, removed a shoe, and scraped that red heel down Tommy’s back like a nail on fire. Men beat him bad. They just wouldn’t get offa him. They tied him to the bars of the jail-house window, but that wasn’t enough. So they dragged his body to the maple tree by the courthouse, then strung him up a second time to smoke in the humid air.

Like dyin’ twice was the only punishment that fit the crime.

I started coughin’, gaggin’, really, and couldn’t stop.

The Anderson boy next to me retched in the grass.

A pregnant woman several rows ahead of me, well, she dropped like a sack of flour. My baby wriggled in my arms, cryin’.

The kids hung on the hem of my dress. I had a fit, like a bone was stuck in my throat.

My insides was churnin’, and I was half-tempted to leave. Someone patted my back. Another handed me a handkerchief. My husband hugged the children, covered their eyes. When the whole thing passed, I looked up and saw Abe crumpled before the maple, already dead, crow bar through his gut, rope roughin’ up his neck.

They pulled and pulled to raise his heavy corpse above their heads. I guess no one would be satisfied until the deed was done.

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Fall 2020 Folks was screamin’, We want Cameron! We want Cameron!

I remembered a raccoon with rabies I once saw, back when I was a girl in Kentucky. It had spit foamin’ from its mouth and shrieked like a rabbit bein’ attacked in the dead of night. (There ain’t nothin’ like that, by the way, an owl or coyote tearin’ into a tender thigh, only to release a sound ferocious as Beelzebub himself, a noise that claws at your spine and won’t let go, makin’ you believe you can’t never be forgiven, even for the smallest of your sins.)

An old woman started prayin’ real loud.

Some people was cryin’, even men.

I thought of a different crowd all of a sudden— Jesus and the fish and loaves, people bein’ full in a right satisfied way. So I had lots of doubts when they yanked Jimmie out because he shined Claude’s shoes.

He wasn’t no killer. But he was with them, I guess, and the Apostle Paul says bad company corrupts good morals.

Besides, why would Mary lie? They dragged him from his cell, noose around his neck already, like they was totally prepared this time, then made him stand between the two thieves.

I lost my balance and started to fall when a man beside me, who’d been yellin’, too, caught me. I thanked him, of course.

Had I gone down, well, I don’t want to think what would’ve happened to my baby girl. As my sight cleared, I heard Jimmie pray somethin’ about mercy and then, clearly, Lord, forgive me my sins.

Claude’s bloody shirt hangin’ from the City Hall window on Boots Street— that popped into my mind. And Mary in the ditch.

A low murmur seemed to calm the crowd.

I looked at Jimmie between the two older boys.

I felt scared, like the silver leaves was whisperin’ in the night air.

And I don’t know where it came from, really.

I ain’t good at explainin’ this part. There was this voice.

Not from behind me, or in front. Not from either side.

But from within. Enough. And again: Enough.

I thought everyone heard it, but by the way they acted, I guess not.

No one looked at me. Even my baby didn’t move.

My kids played at my feet. My husband was finally quiet.

I heard it lift its pitch above the spent assembly, then explode: Take this boy back. He had nothin’ to do with killin’ and rapin’.

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Fall 2020 I felt fear burn my cheeks, panic grip my breath.

I looked around again. No one seemed to notice, ’cept they immediately obeyed. The throng split in two like the Red Sea, and Jimmie rode the miracle between tree and jail, back to the Sheriff, who raised the rope up and offa Jimmie’s throat, then returned him to his cell.

As I walked down Third Street toward Woolworth the next mornin’—my baby cryin’ in the stroller, my daughter singin’ ring around the rosie, my son shootin’ his imaginary gun— I passed the square too tired to care. The maple limbs held nothin’ human anymore. Some people was pickin’ bark off the trunk and collectin’ frayed pieces of hemp.

A man stood on the grass, talkin’ wildly to anyone who’d listen, flashin’ a photo of Tommy and Abe tied forever to their fate.

My son pointed his loaded finger at my daughter.

Her ashes fell all the way down.

Julie L. Moore is the author of four poetry collections, including, most recently, Full Worm Moon, which won a 2018 Woodrow Hall Top Shelf Award and received honorable mention for the Conference on Christianity and Literature's 2018 Book of the Year. A Best of the Net and five-time Pushcart Prize nominee, she has also published poetry in Alaska Quarterly Review, African American Review, Image, New Ohio Review, Poetry Daily, Prairie Schooner, The Southern Review, and Verse Daily. Her work likewise has appeared in several anthologies, including Becoming: What Makes a Woman, published by University of Nebraska Gender Programs, and Every River On Earth: Writing from Appalachian Ohio, published by Ohio University Press. Moore is an Associate Professor of English and the Writing Center Director at Taylor University, where she is the poetry editor of Relief Journal. You can learn more about her work at julielmoore.com.

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Fall 2020

Adirondack Chair Claire Keyes My beloved bathes in the brook, walking naked through the woods while I laze in an Adirondack chair counting white star-blossoms pushing out from raspberry bushes, slapping at black flies taking juicy nips behind my ear, listening to the vireo call over and over again. But nobody answers just the near-distant chuckle of the brook and a motorcycle churning through the valley, past farmhouses, barns, time slowed down, spreading from present to past, the way it sometimes does so that I feel again a rush of air, a helmet strange on my head.

Because I’ve slung my arms around his waist, he doesn’t tell me to grab the sissy bars under the seat.

Destination: north, an old quarry in Rockport, the Harley leaning into the highway’s curves no talking, just the road moving beneath the wheels, the rumble of the pipes, a man’s hands, eyes and feet taking me away. Sometimes we want to be taken away.

Sometimes it’s enough to relax on a porch and listen for the hermit thrush, the winter wren, a rooster crowing.

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Fall 2020

Come September Claire Keyes Cars and trucks ascend our dirt road.

It’s rough, the driving slow and noisy.

Rocks crunch, engines strain.

Gun shots in the distance, perhaps a rifle or a shot-gun.

Some days it’s just our neighbor with his automatic weapon.

He likes to practice on weekends, spraying the cornfield.

Soft-nosed alpacas, grazing within their corral, stampede towards the barn as if he were aiming for them, but he has no plan in mind, just the pleasure of firing his gun.

Between blasts, the air is translucent, the only sound the twitter of chickadees, those friendly souls, pursuing hunters through the woods.

I’ve seen them perch on a hand if one were proffered. Hunters move along, barely making a peep. Ruffed grouse is their pleasure, groundlings they flush from the underbrush, a flurry of wings and anxious piping.

Autumn woods light up for hunters.

Accurate, deadly, they fire right back.

Claire Keyes is the author of two books of poetry, The Question of Rapture and What Diamonds Can Do. Her poems and reviews have appeared recently in Redheaded Stepchild, Mom Egg Review, Two Hawks Quarterly, and Persimmon Tree, among others.

Her chapbook, Rising and Falling, won the Foothills Poetry Competition. Professor Emerita at Salem State University, she lives in Marblehead, Massachusetts where she conducts a monthly poetry salon.

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Fall 2020

Train Country Liz Dolan Leaving hard Bronx pavement behind, we sallied across an iron trestle bridge, its girders, a lace mantilla casting shadows over a chorus of arrow-headed pines black against the sky. We chimed in as we descended weedy, wooden steps into Oak Point Yard where, in overalls and denim cap, Dad, a car knocker, ebonized by grease, secured the locomotive’s pistons, bolts, and screws.

Later, in the parked caboose, prickly roses hugging her door, we sipped tea next to the pot-bellied stove as Dad devoured roast turkey on whole wheat.

When the seven o’clock to Naugatuck screeched like a banshee, we ran to greet her, so close she singed our brows. She snorted smoke, kicked up pebbles, spat rust. That night even honeysuckle was drunk on its own perfume, and we had hope, the kind of hope that flies on silent wings over the lost boys under street lamps coiling rings of smoke up to heaven.

Liz Dolan’s first poetry collection, They Abide,was nominated for The Robert McGovern Prize, Ashland University. Her second, A Secret of Long Life, nominated for a Pushcart, has been published by Cave Moon Press. A nine-time Pushcart nominee and winner of Best of theWeb, she was a finalist for Best of the Net 2014. She won The Nassau Prize for Nonfiction, 2011 and the same prize for fiction, 2015. She lives in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware.

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Fall 2020

I Turn Away Gene Twaronite Our eyes never meet No recognition of humanity Might as well be faceless for all I can see I hold my breath and turn away lest I inhale the deadly droplets of contagion that could be there hanging in the air like ninja spikes as day by day the bonds between us further unravel

Gene Twaronite is a Tucson poet and the author of nine books, including collections of poetry, short stories and essays as well as two juvenile fantasy novels. His latest book is My Life as a Sperm.

Essays from the Absurd Side. Follow more of his writing @thetwaronitezone.com.

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Fall 2020

Small Lessons Jeanine Stevens The sun loves September, purple aster and goldenrod, the wait time till frost glazes cornstalks and sugar maples.

A rehearsal for October; the little brown church in the dell.

How much the wildwood factored in my beginning readers, then by fourth grade, replaced by stories of industry and exports.

Signs go up: “The Bears are Back.”

We are out of range for CNN debates.

Instead, at a used bookstore, I purchase War and Peace, and another titled, Jerusalem.

Violet haze sifts against foothills.

Young spiders spin filaments—silk floating from fence posts and drying herbs, ballooning threads, held by twigs.

You find a baby squirrel dropped from a sycamore branch, four inches, already big jawed and squeaking.

Jeanine Stevens is the author of Limberlost and Inheritor (Future Cycle Press). Her first poetry collection, Sailing on Milkweed, was published by Cherry Grove Collections. She is winner of the MacGuffin Poet Hunt, The Stockton Arts Commission Award, The Ekphrasis Prize and WOMR Cape Cod Community Radio National Poetry Award. Brief Immensity, won the Finishing Line Press Open Chapbook Award. Jeanine recently received her sixth Pushcart Nomination. She participated in Literary Lectures sponsored by Poets and Writers. Work has appeared in Evansville Review, North Dakota Review, Pearl, Stoneboat, Rosebud, Chiron Review, and Forge. Jeanine studied poetry at U.C. Davis and has graduate degrees in Anthropology and Education.

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Fall 2020

The Appraisal Penelope Scambly Schott

“The forgiver and forgiven must each have her wilderness” – Pam Bernard from “Field, a glosa”

My mother had to possess everything – trips to Paris, très chic dresses, the perfect daughter, thick gold bracelets, the spotlight.

She laughed too loud at dinner parties.

She’d look at me sideways, checking: stain on my skirt? hair unparted?

Rebuke shrill and impatient.

I failed her appraisals, tried harder.

For long months while my mother lay on that exquisitely re-upholstered designer couch dying, I sat beside her.

Towards the end, she wasn’t sure who I was.

But I know.

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Fall 2020

Weather Map Penelope Scambly Schott I was born in a deep forest after a snow storm I spent my girlhood in red boots I was born giving birth My son arrived like a northeaster my daughter like a tornado Year after year among storm-twisted ruins the wind kept us all spinning I was born at my mother’s deathbed The wind hushed Nobody blamed me for the weather I unlaced my red boots and walked out of the forest into the map of the great long day

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Fall 2020

I Want You to Believe This: Penelope Scambly Schott Somewhere on this planet you have a precious sister you don’t know.

She escaped from your parents’ house before she was born, but she has always watched you.

Whenever you cross a bridge, she holds up the fragile air beneath you.

Once as you shoveled snow, you glimpsed her in the ice fringes of your own hair, or you mistook her for a lone dawn coyote, not understanding the frisson of love between you.

Whatever your affliction, she arrives across water to help you carry your halo of pain.

After she has vanished like mist over an estuary, you know you will survive.

Believe this: now that your unseen sister has come to caress your eyelids, you may trust the double abutments of every bridge, you may stop apologizing for your life.

Penelope Scambly Schott is a past recipient of the Oregon Book Award for Poetry. Her newest book is On Dufur Hill.

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Fall 2020

Equinox Tom Raithel Maybe the way the half-moon lingers, pale as a ghost in the bloodstained dawn, or the way that cloud, once iridescent, seems like sackcloth weighted with ash.

The trees look older and sadder today.

Larcenist winds are stealing the gold.

Birds, contemplating all things from a wire, are shrouded in cloaks of apocalypse.

All the roads wander, void of desire.

Houses have sunk into fitful sleep.

Over the broken latch of a gate, a spider spins a foreboding sign.

You understand things will be different tomorrow, the air more bitter, the light more lean.

You understand you must be different, too, when again you walk under these changing skies.

Tom Raithel grew up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and has worked as a journalist at several newspapers in the Midwest.

Recently from Evansville, Indiana, today, he lives in Cleveland, Ohio with his wife, Theresa. His poems have appeared in The Southern Review, The Comstock Review, Nimrod, Midwest Quarterly, Atlanta Review, and other journals. Finishing Line Press has published his chapbook, Dark Leaves, Strange Light.

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Fall 2020

The Last Days of the Flu Holly Day We move like dying butterflies against each other chitinous wings rasping dry in final death throes like dead leaves pushed along the sidewalk by the wind like dead scales sloughed off against a rock.

I hear my jagged breath echoing your own feeble one lungs rattling like an engine running dry but refusing to die gears almost catching but slipping again and again if I stay here too long, here, next to you I might catch it, too.

The Day the Leaves Started to Change Holly Day The bird flutters into the church like some sort of portent disturbs the service with a flurry of feathers. It would be nice if it was a dove, or some brilliant, golden, phoenix-type of bird but it’s just a sparrow come in from the cold.

The preacher waits until the bird has settled before continuing on with his speech, but he is distracted. Every time the bird moves to another corner of the church, he instinctively covers the top of his bald head with one robed arm as if too used to having birds shit on him while flying overhead.

Holly Day has been a writing instructor at the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis since 2000. Her poetry has recently appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, Grain, and Harvard Review, and her newest poetry collections are Into the Cracks (Golden Antelope Press), Cross Referencing a Book of Summer (Silver Bow Publishing), The Tooth is the Largest Organ in the Human Body (Anaphora Literary Press), and Book of Beasts (Weasel Press).

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Fall 2020

Use Solstice in this Sentence Jennifer M. Phillips Summer has cast out her line, and for today it lies across the fog-milky lake and is still until she begins to reel the light back in.

Gurgle and slash of mud where the sump erupts into the grass.

Today like a wheel in mud can go neither forward nor back.

Deluvial time has us mired. If our gullies shunt into eternity we do not know it now and here.

What we have learned by rote, we forget by heart like the moth that came in by the open door but for hours pummels its futile wings against a window screen.

Down the slope, the slotted bench-back jails the light, fencing the open green behind its illusory bars.

Just sitting on the steps, a flutter of panic starts like a cornered wren stuttering under my ribs for no good reason.

We fold away words like zest and luxuriate and delight -- that lacy underthing reserved for celebration, and fret in the sequestration of this season.

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Fall 2020

American Sign Jennifer M. Phillips Left hanging.

It must be meant for someone else the immaculate manuscript of the night sky each iota and yod in its place as future's finger keeps moving down the scroll of the past, a moment of music emerging from the Rosetta of your tongue and mine, inaudible meanings re-encrypted in the speech.

Am I talking to myself? Are we all simply our own echo?

Walking down Indian Trail to the shore trying to pry the soft meat out of the shell of possibility while the limp moon dangles from a branch like a lost balloon. Listening always listening.

I understand nothing but hold it a long time in my palm.

Someone is always claiming to crack the code of God's broken speech for the first time.

Someone is always pointing this way or that spotlit and insistent.

Fool's gold. All that hubbub and burlesque.

When we stand still, the night's hands are moving like a dancer's sizing up the air in its many dimensions and signing it to us under the rubric of the dark.

Jennifer M. Phillips lives in Massachusetts. She has published poetry in quite a few poetry journals and had poems selected recently as a finalist in the White Mice Contest of the International Lawrence Durrell Society. She is equally at home in the U.K. where she was born, and the USA where she now lives, with a predilection for the Atlantic coasts cold weather, cold water, lots of green.

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Fall 2020

Homeland Yuliia Vereta I haven’t seen my mom For two years.

I haven’t tasted her best-in-the-world cutlets For almost five.

I haven’t walked the dirt roads that pushed me to go far away I don’t even remember for how long.

I am learning my sixth language, None of my friends speak my mother tongue.

Time is everything I have; I don’t want money any more.

All of my relatives died while I was not there.

And it’s just my mom, who is left, whom I have not seen For two years.

She turned fifty last month.

She looks like she is sixty though.

I am glad I can move my home and whole my one-member family To another place and another beginning. One day.

I remember going to that place I still For some reason call home Two years ago.

And it wasn’t my home any more.

Everything I knew changed, Everyone I loved either died or left.

The truth is when you are far enough long enough You can never return to the place you remember.

It’s not where you left it.

And it will never be back.

Yuliia Vereta is a young writer from Ukraine, whose other works were published in Litro Magazine (UK), Genre: urban arts (USA), Penultimate Peanut Magazine (USA), Valley Voices (USA) and McGuffin (USA). Yuliia received the 2018 City of Rockingham Short Story Award (Australia) and became the finalist in Poetry Matters Project (USA) as well as Hessler Poetry Contest (USA).

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Fall 2020

Uncooperative Wildlife Nancy Kay Peterson I suppose I look ridiculous standing in the parking lot of the grocery store writing down the words made of large letters protruding from the store's facade. I am diagramming where the sparrows' nests are: two in the E of BAKERY (the penthouse level); none in DELI OPEN 24 (a few perch on the O and in the P); one nest each in the bottom curve of the S in HOURS, the Y's tail in PHARMACY, and the bottom of the E in VIDEO. E is the letter of choice for discerning birds, but they skipped the E's in DELI and OPEN. I could say that anyway. There is poetic license. The audience would say: "Isn't that amazing they chose all the E's?" It would please them, I'm sure. I'm feeling a bit irritated. These birds are ruining my poem by not being clever enough, by not understanding irony. These sparrows lack artistic sensibilities. They've abandoned me like an old nest, left me standing alone debating truth and art, a poem in the hand that can't take flight.

Nancy Kay Peterson’s poetry has appeared in print and online in numerous publications, including most recently Lost Lake Folk Opera, One Sentence Poems, Spank the Carp and Three Line Poetry. From 2004-2009, she was co-publisher and co-editor of Main Channel Voices: A Dam Fine Literary Magazine. Her chapbook, Belated Remembrance, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2010. A second chapbook, Selling the Family, is due out soon. She lives in Winona, Minnesota.

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Fall 2020

the last of the white noise George Korolog there are things more hushed than His silence, admonitions beneath the edge of the storm, where each sound had been muffled in fur, where everything ever thought had been removed, where all movement had been restrained to the point where there were only statues left to be destroyed, where flowering had finally ended and the only remaining tongues of dying starlight spoke to God even as He sought refuge from the resounding crash of the final echo from which He could not escape, from which even He could not hide, clasping at the end, bowing His head, hands to His ears, struggling once again with yet another beginning.

George Korolog is a San Francisco Bay Area poet and writer whose work has appeared in over 50 literary journals, including The Los Angeles Review, The Southern Indiana Review, Rattle, Chiron Review, The Monarch Review, Naugatuck River Review, Word Riot, River Poets Journal and many others. He has twice been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and twice nominated for Best of the Net. His first book of poetry, Collapsing Outside the Box,was published by Aldrich Press in November 2012, His second book of poems, Raw String was published in October, 2014 by Finishing Line Press. He is working on his third book of poems, The Little Truth.

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Fall 2020

Midnight’s Morning Paul Daniel Lee A slow sun huffs up the sky-hill It’s steeper in November On a sleepy morning I don’t cancel class but life In a dream I stand up and turn down the thermostat In another I burn the whole apartment for a moment’s warmth A touch on my shoulder startles me It’s the morning bird Urging the sun on and on Paul Daniel Lee is a 2020 recipient for the Academy of American Poets’ University & College Poetry Prize. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in The American Journal of Poetry, I-70 Review, on Poets.org, and others. He previously served as the Assistant Poetry Editor for Willow Springs and currently teaches English and Creative Writing in Columbia, Missouri.

Mules Janet Jiahui Wu we are loaded every day like mules to climb up the mountain and then we go down and then we go up and down up and down until we become the mules and nothing else Janet Jiahui Wu is a Hong-Kongese-Chinese-Australian visual artist and writer of poetry and fiction. She has published in various literary magazines such as Voiceworks, Cordite Poetry Review, Mascara Literary Review, Rabbit Poetry, Plumwood Mountain Poetry, foam:e, Tipton Poetry Journal, Yes!, Gone Lawn, and so on. She currently lives in South Australia.

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Fall 2020

Fly summer DS Maolalai it was a fly summer. they landed, thick like mosaic tiling, and bumbled about, busy as distant cars, but closer, ruining our arrangements of fruit. chrysty had been recently promoted, and I was still at the bank, making less than she did and not minding. it was a fly summer; that was the thing – their blue-black mechanical bodies landing on our books our computer screens, as if life at home were borne up to pigshit and slaughterhouse. and we, me and chrysty, were destined of course to try. we hung traps for them in the heat, opened some new jars of vinegar. left winebottles on our kitchen tables and closed them with malice each morning. the dog was quite sick – a shot from the vet each weekend. the world buzzed with fly summer, thick as black berries in a black bramble patch. the skin of our salt, dripping with sweat and surrender. even the dog grew tired of chasing those things.

DS Maolalai lives in Dublin, Ireland and has been nominated six times for Best of the Net and three times for the Pushcart Prize. His poetry has been released in two collections, Love is Breaking Plates in the Garden (Encircle Press, 2016) and Sad Havoc Among the Birds (Turas Press, 2019).

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Fall 2020

An Old Ladder Richard Luftig Twenty feet long, lying in the weeds.

Shedding its skin in splinters from the years.

Each of its step-grids yield a hopscotch for rabbits, a needed plat for slugs to explore silted treasures below.

Bend down close, get to eye level.

See its perspective like a vanishing point of a spur-line railroad track that once led to some silo or barn or factory, long torn up, torn down, dreams that people who lived here must have dreamed of but which never came to pass.

And still, this ancient wood hangs on, each rung pressed to the chest of this rich, flat earth, waiting, no, yearning, to prop up a life again.

[This poem was first published in Oasis]

Richard Luftig is a former professor of educational psychology and special education at Miami University in Ohio now residing in California. He is a recipient of the Cincinnati Post-Corbett Foundation Award for Literature. His poems have appeared in numerous literary journals in the United States and internationally in Canada, Australia, Europe, and Asia. Two of his poems recently appeared in Ten Years of Dos Madres Press.

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Fall 2020

Holy and Healing Hands John Cardwell I am here by the grace Of holy and healing hands.

In a foreign land, such hands Guided me, shielded me, Nourished and took me in.

In a place of alien mysteries, The hands of strangers Opened their car to me On a naïve sojourn from day Into evening wilderness.

The hands of others kept me From a gang’s deadly intent, The grasp of soldiers, A prison’s door, and Got me on a plane to home.

The hands of a rural doctor Cured my deadly dysentery, And those of a native priest Gave me a sweet mango In a desperate hour of thrist.

A brave bureaucrat’s hands Signed the papers of freedom.

These foreign hands of love Touched life and many holy books.

Their fingers ran over words from Jesus, Jehovah, Allah, or atheist philosophers: Their shibboleths espoused charity.

Some hands knew the divine In animals, soil and trees, The places and objects of nature.

Other hands prayed to ancestors, To conjure and share the wisdom Of generations among the living.

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Fall 2020 The hands that saved me, All had kindness and courage Common to the lives and beliefs They served on this earth.

They provided shelter to travelers, And to the dreams of children For their hands held sweet grace That was holy and healing And were, for whomever they served, What goodness must truly be.

John Cardwell lives in Indianapolis. This poem was inspired by John’s experiences of living and working in West Africa.

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Fall 2020

The Rock I Carried on the Camino Cindy Buchanan didn’t weigh much— more than a soul but less than a body.

Its atoms came from stars where (some say) heaven lies demanding more prayers, no matter the cost.

My thumb slotted into the smooth dip on one side.

Pressing, I could feel your heartbeat, faint and faraway.

Crowning a sturdy wooden pole, the Cruz de Ferro reaches high, a beacon for travelers on the Way. Below, pilgrims place their stones, some watering them with tears so that they might bloom with pleas: please, please, please.

Because just maybe cold probability can be fractured by star-birthed atoms, I left my rock under that rusted iron cross so that, maybe, your cancer-ridden cells would be cast out by wood and iron and stone— and your tired body would bloom with life.

Cindy Buchanan grew up in Alaska and has lived in Seattle since graduating from Gonzaga. An avid runner and hiker with a deep interest in Buddhist philosophy and Zen meditation practice, she has completed the Camino de Santiago in Spain, the Coast to Coast Walk in England, and the Milford Walking Track in New Zealand. Her work has been published in Mobius: The Journal of Social Change and is upcoming in Straight Forward Poetry, Whistling Shade, and Evening Street Review.

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Fall 2020

Norway, Left Behind Madelyn Camrud Weathered fence posts lean in the wind. Everything washed clean under cold aluminum skies. Trees grow from seed washed up. Try to imagine the love story: Grandmother crossed the ocean, seasick; came up from the ship’s belly, danced on the deck with an uncle; he pumped their arms up and down—shoes click-clacked to the rhythm of a fiddle. When the music stopped she leaned over the rail and let it go. That’s when Norway fell into the ocean—that’s where she left it and you know the ocean is deep.

Baptismal Dream Madelyn Camrud I’m the one who from the church balcony dumps buckets of water— possibly on purpose but I appear to mean no harm. I’m the one who anoints the heads of others and they’ve no idea where the water comes from; no one knows why they get wet, no one likes it; and I’m not the one to tell them. I’d be so difficult to forgive. From the church I know best, the choir loft where I sing and sit through sermons I don’t like I spoil things for people underneath. Have to say it gives me some degree of satisfaction. Sometimes I dump what I can on my best friend—even on the man I care about; and especially on the heads of people in the front pew, cranking their necks to look at us in the choir as if they believe we lord our high position over them.

Madelyn Camrud has lived all but nine months of her life in North Dakota. She completed her formal education in English and Visual art at the University of North Dakota. She received a Master’s degree in English with emphasis on creative writing in 1990. Having published three collections of poetry and a chapbook, she is nearing completion of a fourth collection entitled On The Way to Moon Island.

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Fall 2020

Prozac Speaks Lukpata Lomba I Some men go to bed with pebbles; some men stuff pebbles in their words, mix lime and salt to make rain.

Listen: if grief is all you flaunt with bones and muscles, drop it at my feet.

II Throw your thick face at the newbies, ricochet in the room to make rain, roll on the foam to please the spirits. O squirm!

If you’d ever known grief, you’d love me more than you do.

III Who dare question the strength of my euphemisms? O dare!

Who dare tie down the souls I set free?

Sucks to their warnings about abuse! Sucks to your science, I’m science.

You’d love me more than you do.

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Fall 2020 IV I want to cry out against this world for sin against creation—some turn 70 at 23, grow wrinkles at 18!

I speak holiness, I speak peace!

V Take the red off your limpid eyes, watch the birds flapping their wings.

I speak doses!

To hell with their warnings about effects!

You’d love me more.

VI Some schlep off with fire proclaimed by my lovers— what is side effect but an effect of healing!

Sucks to their fire and medical trifles; they who love me love me in secret places.

Lukpata Lomba is a Nigerian poet with work previously published in Jacar Press's One, South Florida Poetry Journal, Squawk Back Journal and elsewhere.

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Fall 2020

Mojo Hand Luke Daugherty Bri likes me, so even when she's not my waitress she still comes over to chat sitting down in my booth I like her too so I suppose that makes us friends she is tender and craves to laugh, to smile with loveliness and strength that I think is overlooked by some including herself but her karma is off for reasons she doesn't understand so she does what juju she can to improve her supernatural lot in life I asked if she carries a mojo hand in her pocket she said that she did but she doesn't tell people because they'll make fun of her I don't make fun of her she's just trying to get it all sorted out and she's still young, hopeful, caring, beautiful, and I believe that she has good things to come

Luke Daugherty lives in Plainfield, Indiana.

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Fall 2020

Natural History Jane Attanucci As the congregation of meadow birds dwindles, I’m drawn to watch them, in ones or twos, slice the harvest gray air, goldenrods unfurling and brittle-brown Queen Anne’s Lace bowing low. .

Anne, my mother, long-deceased, steadfast resurrection-of-the-bodylife-everlasting kind of faith; my own stitched with awe & doubt in these dark November days of threatened catastrophe. .

Lithe-winged descendants of dinosaurs, fall birds stir hope and cold conclusions.

Who will survive our reckless Anthropocene?

Wild carrots sweep the path.

Jane Attanucci, a retired college professor, has poems published in the Aurorean, Bird’s Thumb, Off the Coast, The Pittsburgh Poetry Review and Third Wednesday among others. She was awarded the New England Poetry Barbara Bradley Award in 2014. Her chapbook, First Mud, was released by Finishing Line Press in 2015. Her first full-length collection, A River Within Spills Light, will be released by Turning Point in 2021. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Fall 2020

Once I Was Old Gary Barkow Once I was old in a pasture of speech where grasses sound the human silence.

Words and knees on the floor of my heart, and every prayer a breeze of insect talk and spider silks heralding the morning glories.

Soon the cows come talk to the pond, and Pond listens.

Distinctions at the pond are ornamental — Pond does not judge.

When I was a child, my mom was the pond — even now, I squeal her silly sounds when prairie dogs kiss.

I’ll build no fence around my pond.

Dear Future, you’re invited: I’ll write a poem in a puddle when I don’t like now; I’ll insect talk and spider silk a lotus from my sorrow.

I press my heart to Jesus and offer my will.

I share my silly mom with Jesus and press my heart again.

Gary Barkow lives in Colorado, studies mathematics and practices Tai Chi Ch’uan. He walks around feeling loved and keeps a flashlight by his futon in case he has a brilliant idea at night. He doesn’t know where poetry comes from or why mathematics so exquisitely obtains to the universe, so enjoys the mystery.

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Fall 2020

Holy, Holy, Holy Carol Hamilton So the Orthodox Jew stretches high on his toes at his recitation reaches for the ether we neither truly see nor truly understand for all our building-with-blocksof-primary-colors quantum physics and such all of our reaching heavenward with our ritually-clean fingers ten for each or most and this in imitation of angels whom in truth I can vouch for as little as I can the known universe of those early wandering tribes or that of our mammoth wandering telescopes We are reaching as high as we can each of us on tippy-toes in our kindergarten games and still like a dumbwaiter I am held down some counter weight a heavy limit on my rising level in my life once more and I can only sing "Holy, Holy, Holy"

Carol Hamilton has recent publications Louisiana Literature, Hawaii Pacific Review, Southwest American Literature, Valparaiso Poetry Review, San Pedro River Review, Dryland, Bookends Revuew, Tiny Spoons, Gyroscope, Poem, Brushfire, Sin Fronteras/Writers Without Borders, Psaltry and Lyre, Ceseara, Broad River Review, Burningwood Literary Review, Abbey, Main Street Rag, Angel City Review, Hole in the Head Review and others. She has published 17 books: children's novels, legends and poetry. She is a former Poet Laureate of Oklahoma.

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Fall 2020

Bone Breaks the Silence Will Schmit I turned a doorknob with my left hand. First time since the bone break.

Cheerful at last under codeine and cast, a book of the Gulag pillow propped.

The jailed poets learned English on pages of toilet paper.

Hard labor for storytelling, the dissenters construct fairy castles to house their hope.

Soon I will clasp a necklace, the sling as long forgotten as pepper spray in my face.

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Fall 2020

These Forms Are Part of the Interview Will Schmit I bought a cheap suit for a cheap job, and styled my hair after my grandfather's photo.

The wild west in me hung like a mis-buttoned vest on a scarecrow.

I noticed Kafka's initials, and then some, carved into the coffee room Formica.

Hearing my name mispronounced I reach for a borrowed hat.

Patting my pockets I remember: Money never loves what we do for it.

Lifeless, it supposes living the reward.

Will Schmit is a Midwestern poet transplanted to Northern California. Will has been writing, and reading poetry, in between bouts of learning to play the saxophone, for nearly forty years.

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Fall 2020

Church Stranded by Strip Mining Timothy Martin They dug and dug (and dug) up the town looking for lignite, as if the earth were a tormented skin that only the fingernails of the excavators could give relief to. Until finally: on a spare column all its own, lonely, inaccessible, its hymns unreplenished, it stood in air. None wanted to be the destroyer, Satan in a horned hard hat.

So they sculpted everything but, like gluttons feigning a loss of appetite with the last forkful close at hand.

The mouse asleep underneath a pew awoke to find itself in the most excessive mousetrap in the world. Stained glass saints staring outward prayed to each other trying to find which one was the patron of vertigo victims.

Meanwhile those below nudged things another foot heavenward so that Someone else could foreclose on this house which grace abandoned.

Timothy Martin lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan. His work has appeared in numerous journals, including Prairie Schooner, The Comstock Review, and RHINO. He has published two collections of verse, Stealing Hymnals from the Choir from FutureCycle Press (recipient of the publisher’s annual Book Prize), and Drowning at the Pool Party for Lifeguards from Prolific Press.

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Fall 2020

All Hallows’ Chores Alessio Zanelli Get out of bed as soon as day breaks, when most are still sleeping, enjoy breakfast on smoking coffee while listening to the headlines.

Peacefully gather your thoughts.

Once wide awake, take a knife, old but sharp, go outside, cut the grass out of the asphalt cracks by the gate, trim the twigs bending down over the iron fence, sweep the leaves on the sidewalk in front of the house, so that pedestrians won't tread them around.

When done, have a good look at the sky, to guess when it could start to rain, give your puppy a cuddle and take him inside with you, hand him a treat and pour yourself a glass of red, sit in the armchair and wait for the soup to be ready.

Rest in the afternoon, groove on the evening.

Take it easy, make it last, suffice, there's no do-over, for the Saints are stingy and used to playing hard to get.

They revel once a year and bestow blessings just today, but the path is long and winter's yet far from beginning.

[This poem was first published by Eclectica]

Alessio Zanelli is an Italian poet who writes in English and whose work has appeared in over 170 literary journals from 16 countries. His fifth original collection, titled The Secret Of Archery, was published in 2019 by Greenwich Exchange Publishing (London). For more information please visit www.alessiozanelli.it.

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Fall 2020

Social Distancing Redux Michael McManus I trusted your trust to find the algorithm that favors my continued existence. So, you made me a reservation for the winter season. Americana, here I am after all the elephants have left with the Traveling Show and the satellite dish and quantum telephone are no longer working.

My Friends. My friends. I like knowing our histories.

It’s why Johnny Cash will no longer return to Folsom Prison, but Kendrick Lamar will go on pimping butterflies.

What music should we fashion out here where the pavement ends?— A chaos beating inside the heart?

Or the Blues?— Plenty, of which, follow me around like misbegotten groupies, waiting for me to play the daily Tao of I am far from home.

Resurrections are easy to stage when a Bible is stapled to a little boy’s back and he’s water boarded with catechisms and medieval superstitions.

I have the scars to prove it. They know that looking for me where I can’t be found is bound to hammer in a head or two.

Sunlit hillside. Candle in the open window.

Don’t look for my fingerprints on the back of a cloud or the hands of a clock.

Look for me staying as high and hidden as I need to, a voyeur on the 57th floor of nowhere, looking out through the delicate lenses that magnify my world, until I finally find you all done up in bomb shelter blue— A new Lucinda Williams tattoo on the bicep of my mercurial angel, who is so fond of her freedom.

I struggle and strain strain for metaphors, bits and pieces of a long gone thesis that will fill up the pages so others can know how I feel.

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Fall 2020

I feel you watching me from across the room, long past looking for perfection, the way the aged athlete looks back on the glory days of the summer sandlots.

Beloved, never give up the chance to die only once, you would whisper while leading me to the gallows, when no one was there to tell us no; when no one was there to tell us only one person could go.

Michael McManus has published in many places, most recently the North American Journal of Poetry, and in the past the Tipton Poetry Journal, among others. He is the recipient of an Artist Fellowship Award for Literature from the Louisiana Division of the Arts and currently lives in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

* Terry Savoie If Emily Dickinson happened upon Térèse of Lisieux, they both might walk out into a field of buttercups, daisies & forget-me-nots, but they'd turn away from the other, each returning to the unquestionable pathos of their own life so that, as individuals, each could once again listen for the unique & irresistible music only they seemed blessed to hear.

Terry Savoie lives in Iowa and has had more than four hundred poems published both here and abroad over the past four decades. These include ones in APR, Poetry (Chicago), Ploughshares, North American Review, American Journal of Poetry and The Iowa Review as well as recent or forthcoming issues of North Dakota Quarterly, One, America, Chiron Review, and Tar River Poetry among several others. A small selection titled Reading Sunday won the Bright Hill Chapbook Competition in 2018.

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Fall 2020

Outside the Moment Frederick Michaels forest fairies slip into shadows dancing limp as dying flames until they’re quenched in slumber by the last faded rays of day the black veil of night descends wafting to ground about my body it coats my imaginary sanctuary in mystically silent enchantment as comets and meteors play tag and race around amid the planets I lie on a bed of soft pine needles and stare down a vast universe my mind swims the ocean of stars speeds like light between galaxies I am unbounded by earthly walls unconfined by reality’s shackles all the mysteries of creation reveal and I feel a kinship to all I survey I am invested by a joy of knowing I’ll be found with a smile on my lips

Frederick Michaels writes in retirement in Indianapolis.

His poetry has appeared in a variety of poetry anthologies (including several published by Brick Street Poetry, Chatter House Press and others), various on-line and printed journals around the world, and in his book Potholes in the Universe from Chatter House Press (2016).

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Fall 2020

Point Carol Tyx When it feels like there’s no point in writing, I sharpen my pencils.

Holding my yellow, star-shaped sharpener over the trash can I turn the #2 in small circles.

I’m part of the slow school the pressure precisely placed the shavings drifting down like ashes, nearly weightless like the sawdust in my father’s shop specks of wood-dust hovering in sunlight, which is how he appears to me these days, the tiniest fleck floating by a window, a sixteenth note suspended, a point so fine it could break in an instant pointless again, only the sweeping up remaining.

Carol Tyx lives in Iowa City, where she facilitates a prison book club, raises her voice in the community sing movement, and supports community-based agriculture. Her poetry has most recently been published in Big Muddy, Caesura, Iowa City Poetry in Public, and Remaking Achilles: Slicing into Angola’s History with Hidden River Press. Currently Tyx is the artist-in-residence at Prairiewoods eco-spirituality center. She also makes a phenomenal strawberry rhubarb pie.

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Fall 2020

Autumn Is Not Desolate Cameron Morse Its lost red maple leaf tucked like a feather in the green brim of the lawn rests beside the matted filaments of the actual black and blue plume the blue jay lost.

Autumn is an acorn-bombarded driveway, a threshing floor of yellow powder.

It is not barren. The world is not fallen.

Even a fledgling crow can caw.

The maggot I found in my pocket meant no harm, touching tenderly my unknowing hand.

My fingertips numb in the pine-scented icebox of shade tree shade, sure, but even Dad isn’t macabre.

His living ghost keeps me company.

He and his son, whom I am no longer, will accompany me always.

Autumn’s altostratus ceiling shifts five thousand miles above our thread marks.

Cameron Morse lives with his wife Lili and two children in Blue Springs, Missouri. His first collection, Fall Risk, won Glass Lyre Press’s 2018 Best Book Award. His latest is Baldy (Spartan Press, 2020). He serves as a poetry editor at Harbor Review.

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Fall 2020

Central Beach (Indiana Dunes) James K. Zimmerman on the voluptuous pregnant belly of the dunes children giggle and shriek, gulls swoop and soar in the graying sunset teeming masters of mayhem and cacophony, they share a sworn refusal to let the late-summer day die fathers (as if to join the game) hold out their arms and smile shout laugh but the children know it is a trap to scoop them up and take them home give them food and baths to warm them up and calm them down so they run away, diving and rolling on the fish-breath sand, shrieking and swooping with the crazy-eyed gulls at the edge of the clamoring waves just beyond the outstretched reach of waning daylight and one last time

James K. Zimmerman's writing appears in American Life in Poetry, Chautauqua, Nimrod, Pleiades, Salamander, and Vallum, among others. He is author of “Little Miracles” (Passager, 2015) and "Family Cookout" (Comstock, 2016), winner of the Jessie Bryce Niles Prize. He lives in Pleasantville, New York.

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Fall 2020

Red Row Boat Andrew Hubbard Daubed in leftover house paint The cheapest shade of red With oarlocks that don’t fit: They squeak with every pull, The oars pop out if I’m not careful.

The skiff is old— Water oozes in between the floorboards.

I have to stop and bail Every fifteen minutes With an old tomato sauce can.

It’s hard to bend that far, I pant, I bail, I pour water Over the side.

While I bail the chill wind Pushes me just the wrong way.

I row again Making headway, But not much.

The skiff, the freezing water, The cold wind, myself, I thought we were different pieces Of a puzzle, now I realize we are one piece Of a larger puzzle.

Andrew Hubbard was born and raised in a coastal Maine fishing village. He earned degrees in English and Creative Writing from Dartmouth College and Columbia University, respectively. For most of his career he has worked as Director of Training for major financial institutions. He has had four prose books published, and his most recent books, collections of poetry, were published in 2014, 2016, and 2018. He is a casual student of cooking and wine, a former martial arts instructor and competitive weight lifter, a collector of edged weapons, and a licensed handgun instructor. He lives in rural Indiana with his son, his wife, a giant, black German Shepard, and a gaggle of semi-tame deer.

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Fall 2020

The Only Country I’ve Been Dead In R. Nikolas Macioci One night I hope to find you in a dream, to learn what a father's embrace is and finally resolve the pain of a flawed relationship. Because I saw you naked so many times sleeping off a bender, I knew your body and its scars. I sat beside the bed and believed, though it may have been thin as bone, that you loved me. Even if you had awakened and nagged me not to be your child, I would have waited to hear it from God. I would have waited to make sense of the passionate waiting, to know why I wouldn't just close the door on your vacancy. I huddled down in that room, hugged my knees, believing someone cared about my solitude. I thought you had abandoned me again, this time in sleep.

The crucifix above your bed looked too heavy for a nail to hold. Palm fronds hung behind it. I gazed at you in terror that you would open your eyes and not see me. I heard you snore, watched your chest move with boozy breathing. The brass Jesus gleamed. Jerusalem had never been so close.

R. Nikolas Macioci earned a PhD from The Ohio State University.

OCTELA, the Ohio Council of Teachers of English, named Nik Macioci the best secondary English teacher in the state of Ohio. Nik is the author of two chapbooks as well as seven books: More than two hundred of his poems have been published here and abroad, including The Society of Classic Poets Journal, Chiron, The Comstock Review, Concho River Review, and Blue Unicorn.

Forthcoming books are Rough and Why Dance?

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Fall 2020

Last Night Your Shadow Kenneth Pobo (first words of “I Had Too Much To Dream Last Night” by the Electric Prunes)

left your body and attached to my couch like dirty shade.

I thought I should make the best of it and start a conversation. We had little in common. I still had a body, a wobbly one, but when I walked under a tree, I still cast a shadow.

I asked are you happy as a shadow?

You are. You don’t need a body.

In fact, it had held you back.

I rather envied you, doubt that you envied me. A nightmare named Time joined us. We both ran away. Time smoked and sighed.

Kenneth Pobo is the author of 21 chapbooks and 9 fulllength collections and lives in Pennsylvania. Recent books include Bend of Quiet (Blue Light Press), Loplop in a Red City (Circling Rivers), Dindi Expecting Snow (Duck Lake Books), Wingbuds (cyberwit.net), and Uneven Steven (Assure Press). Opening from Rectos Y Versos Editions is forthcoming. Human rights issues, especially as they relate to the LGBTQIA+ community, are also a constant presence in his work. In addition to poetry, he also writes fiction and essays. For the past thirty-plus years he taught at Widener University and retired in 2020.

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Fall 2020

Swimming Lessons Dave Malone Outside the gymnasium, the Kansas sky ripples in blue like worn denim.

Inside, the shrill whistle pierces ear to elbow then the tinny voice of my teenage instructor who thinks she can teach me how to swim.

There’s not much to remember—except her dunking me into the death of true sound, like being under the covers in winter after a nightmare— there’s this fog of thump and bump, the winter yip of coyotes, the thud and fade of heartbeat.

Dave Malone grew up in both Kansas and Missouri, where he now lives. He attended Ottawa University and later received a master’s degree in English from Indiana State University where he studied poetry under Matthew Brennan. His most recent book is You Know the Ones (Golden Antelope Press, 2017). Works have appeared in Elder Mountain: A Journal of Ozark Studies, San Pedro River Review, and Plainsongs.

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Fall 2020 Review: Southwest by Midwest by Norbert Krapf

Reviewed by Joyce Brinkman Title: Southwest by Midwest Author: Norbert Krapf Publication Date: May 30, 2020 Publisher: Dos Madres Press

Norbert Krapf is the Indiana Jones of poetry. This Hoosier poet of place approaches each of his locations like an archeologist entering a cave he is compelled to explore. He goes deep and stays until he has extracted the very essence of those surroundings. His cave diving has included places like his ancestral homeland, Franconia, his childhood home in Southern Indiana, his teaching days in New York City and with his newest book the Southwest of the United States.

At the end of his poem "Twin Bird Songs from Truchas," Krapf asks the following question about the two birds looking in opposite directions in the painting.

Is this an image of dual-vision?

Say someone from Costa Rica looking back home but also at his beloved New Mexico?

Or a Midwesterner who loves his Indiana homeland but also what he see in the Southwest?

In spite of the question mark, the question has already been answered.

Krapf has a canny ability to mimic a two hump camel with the capacity to

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Fall 2020 be filled with one place at the same time he carries the life sustenance of another.

Krapf's relationship with the Southwest is anchored in his admiration for the potter Jody Naranjo. He and his wife Katherine own several of her works and they are beautifully scattered throughout the book. That relationship blooms in his poem "The Potter's Touch."

When she touched my hand, I took the shape of a pot.

I could feel pueblos stacked around me and mountains rising not far away. Birds sang in my ears, winged away, and roosted in pinions.

Fish swam in my arteries.

When I opened my mouth, out came feathery poems shaped round and full and sensuous floating like haiku in moonlight.

Smiling pueblos girls who looked like her held pots they had coiled.

Poems escaped from their mouth Like genies released from bottles.

Never was my song so lyrical before the potter’s touch came.

In paying homage to the potter, Krapf is also paying homage to the culture her work embraces. He spends several poems on the details of the craft.

Such as in "Poems and Pots": She takes snakes of clay and winds them together the way a poet coils lines.

She presses and turns them to build a pot the way a poet constructs a poem.

She transfers love with fingers just as the poet does with his pen.

I think the two types of readers who will be attracted to this book are first those who are lovers of Southwest culture and art and secondly those who

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Fall 2020 already appreciate Krapf's forceful, distinctive voice. Krapf's voice moves through his poetry regardless of the place it is inhabiting at the time.

A third, but probably smaller group of readers, will be poets like myself who appreciate his interest in combining poetry with other art forms.

During at least the later part of his career he has seen the value of that type of interrelationship having collaborated with artists from other disciplines. Besides the marriage of poetry and pottery in this book, he has on several occasions combined efforts with photographers and musicians.

Southwest by Midwest also contains poems inspired by paintings including the one I first mentioned and his "Georgia O'Keefe's Mountain."

The mountain became Georgia's because she gave herself to it and recreated it for all of us.

Georgia's eyes and brush created a Pedernal that became ours to behold.

I always appreciate poets who can see through the eyes of the artists who don't speak with words. Believing their vision helps expand the world the poet's words seek to understand. Such experience ultimately expands the readers understanding as well to everyone's enrichment and enjoyment.

Jasper, Indiana native and former Indiana poet Laureate Norbert Krapf's previous poetry volumes include Bloodroot: Indiana Poems, a retrospective collection of 175 poems, Indiana Hill Country Poems (Dos Madres Press, 2019), Catholic Boy Blues, about surviving abuse in childhood by a priest, and The Return of Sunshine, about his Colombian-German- American grandson, Peyton. His most recent book is Southwest by Midwest (Dos Madres Press, 2020). His poems and prose have appeared in over eighty anthologies, including Heartland II: Poems of the Midwest, and hundreds of times in magazines and journals.

His Homecomings: A Writer's Memoir, a sequel to his The Ripest Moments: A Southern Indiana Childhood, is forthcoming. He has received the Lucille Medwick Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, The Glick Indiana Author Award, and a Creative Renewal Fellowship from the Arts Council of Indianapolis. He has a poem in stained-glass at the Indianapolis International Airport, poems on IndyGo Buses, and Garrison Keillor read his poems on The Writer's Almanac. With pianist-composer Monika Herzig, he released a poetry and jazz CD, Imagine, and he collaborates with Indiana bluesman Gordon Bonham. He has also collaborated with Indiana photographers Darryl Jones, David Pierini, and Richard

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Fall 2020 Fields. Since retiring in 2004 as a Professor of English at Long Island University, where he taught for thirty-four years and for eighteen directed the C.W. Post Poetry Center, he has lived with his family in downtown Indianapolis. He loves to spend time in New Mexico and Arizona.

Joyce Brinkman, Indiana Poet Laureate 20022008, believes in poetry as public art. She creates public poetry projects involving her poetry and the poetry of others. Collaborations with visual artists using her poetry for permanent installations include her words in a twenty- five foot stained glass window

by British glass artist Martin Donlin at the Indianapolis International Airport, in lighted glass by Arlon Bayliss at the Indianapolis-Marion County Central Library and on a wall with local El Salvadoran artists in the town square of Quezaltepeque, El Salvador. Her printed works include two chapbooks, Tiempo EspaĂąol, and Nine Poems In Form Nine, and two collaborative books, Rivers, Rails and Runways, and Airmail from the Airpoets from San Francisco Bay Press, with fellow "airpoets" Ruthelen Burns, Joe Heithaus, and Norbert Krapf. Her latest books include the multinational, multilingual book Seasons of Sharing A Kasen Renku Collaboration, from Leapfrog Press, Urban Voices: 51 Poems from 51 American Poets from San Francisco Bay Press, which she co-edited with Carolyn Kreiter-Foronda and Elizabeth Barrett Browning Illuminated by the Message from ACTA Publications. Joyce organized the collaborative poems for the Indiana Bicentennial Legacy Book Mapping the Muse from Brick Street Poetry. She recently completed a public art project in Martinsville, Indiana, featuring poetry she wrote inspired by the life and words of UCLA basketball coach and Hoosier native John Wooden. She is a graduate of Hanover College. Joyce lives in Zionsville, Indiana, with her husband and a cantankerous cat.

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Fall 2020 Editor Barry Harris is editor of the Tipton Poetry Journal and three anthologies by Brick Street Poetry: Mapping the Muse: A Bicentennial Look at Indiana Poetry; Words and Other Wild Things and Cowboys & Cocktails:Poems from the True Grit Saloon. He has published one poetry collection, Something At The Center.

Barry lives in Brownsburg, Indiana and is retired from Eli Lilly and Company. He is married and father of two grown sons.

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.

He graduated a long time ago with a major in English from Ball State University.

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Fall 2020

Contributor Biographies Jane Attanucci, a retired college professor, has poems published in the Aurorean, Bird’s Thumb, Off the Coast, The Pittsburgh Poetry Review and Third Wednesday among others. She was awarded the New England Poetry Barbara Bradley Award in 2014. Her chapbook, First Mud, was released by Finishing Line Press in 2015. Her first full-length collection, A River Within Spills Light, will be released by Turning Point in 2021. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Gary Barkow lives in Colorado, studies mathematics and practices Tai Chi Ch’uan. He walks around feeling loved and keeps a flashlight by his futon in case he has a brilliant idea at night. He doesn’t know where poetry comes from or why mathematics so exquisitely obtains to the universe, so enjoys the mystery.

Cindy Buchanan grew up in Alaska and has lived in Seattle since graduating from Gonzaga. An avid runner and hiker with a deep interest in Buddhist philosophy and Zen meditation practice, she has completed the Camino de Santiago in Spain, the Coast to Coast Walk in England, and the Milford Walking Track in New Zealand. Her work has been published in Mobius: The Journal of Social Change and is upcoming in Straight Forward Poetry, Whistling Shade, and Evening Street Review.

Madelyn Camrud has lived all but nine months of her life in North Dakota. She completed her formal education in English and Visual art at the University of North Dakota. She received a Master’s degree in English with emphasis on creative writing in 1990. Having published three collections of poetry and a chapbook, she is nearing completion of a fourth collection entitled On The Way to Moon Island.

John Cardwell lives in Indianapolis. This poem was inspired by John’s experiences of living and working in West Africa.

Luke Daugherty lives in Plainfield, Indiana.

Holly Day has been a writing instructor at the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis since 2000. Her poetry has recently appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, Grain, and Harvard Review, and her newest poetry collections are Into the Cracks (Golden Antelope Press), Cross Referencing a Book of Summer (Silver Bow Publishing), The Tooth is the Largest Organ in the Human Body (Anaphora Literary Press), and Book of Beasts (Weasel Press).

Liz Dolan’s first poetry collection, They Abide,was nominated for The Robert McGovern Prize, Ashland University. Her second, A Secret of Long Life, nominated for a Pushcart, has been published by Cave Moon Press. A nine-time Pushcart nominee and winner of Best of theWeb, she was a finalist for Best of the Net 2014. She won The Nassau Prize for Nonfiction, 2011 and the same prize for fiction, 2015. She lives in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware.

William Greenway’s Selected Poems was the Poetry Book of the Year Award winner from FutureCycle Press, and his tenth collection, Everywhere at Once, won the Poetry Book of the Year Award from the Ohio Library Association, as did his eighth collection Ascending Order. Publications include Poetry, American Poetry Review, Southern Review, Missouri Review, Georgia Review, Southern Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, Poetry Northwest, and Shenandoah. Greenway is Distinguished Professor of English Emeritus at Youngstown State University, and now lives in Ephrata, Pennsylvania.

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Fall 2020 Carol Hamilton has recent publications in San Pedro River Review, Dryland, Pinyon, Commonweal, Southwestern American Literature, Adirondack Review, The Maynard, The Sea Letter, Tiny Spoon, U.S.1 Worksheet, Fire Poetry Review, Homestead Review, Shot Glass Journal, Poem, Haight Ashbury Poetry Journal, Sandy River Review, I-70 Review, Blue Unicorn, former people Journal, Poetica Review, Zingara Review, and others. She has published 17 books: children's novels, legends and poetry. She is a former Poet Laureate of Oklahoma.

Andrew Hubbard was born and raised in a coastal Maine fishing village. He earned degrees in English and Creative Writing from Dartmouth College and Columbia University, respectively. For most of his career he has worked as Director of Training for major financial institutions. He has had four prose books published, and his most recent books, collections of poetry, were published in 2014, 2016, and 2018. He is a casual student of cooking and wine, a former martial arts instructor and competitive weight lifter, a collector of edged weapons, and a licensed handgun instructor. He lives in rural Indiana with his son, his wife, a giant, black German Shepard, and a gaggle of semi-tame deer.

Claire Keyes is the author of two books of poetry, The Question of Rapture and What Diamonds Can Do. Her poems and reviews have appeared recently in Redheaded Stepchild, Mom Egg Review, Two Hawks Quarterly, and Persimmon Tree, among others.

Her chapbook, Rising and Falling, won the Foothills Poetry Competition. Professor Emerita at Salem State University, she lives in Marblehead, Massachusetts where she conducts a monthly poetry salon.

George Korolog is a San Francisco Bay Area poet and writer whose work has appeared in over 50 literary journals, including The Los Angeles Review, The Southern Indiana Review, Rattle, Chiron Review, The Monarch Review, Naugatuck River Review, Word Riot, River Poets Journal and many others. He has twice been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and twice nominated for Best of the Net. His first book of poetry, Collapsing Outside the Box,was published by Aldrich Press in November 2012, His second book of poems, Raw String was published in October, 2014 by Finishing Line Press. He is working on his third book of poems, The Little Truth.

Paul Daniel Lee is a 2020 recipient for the Academy of American Poets’ University & College Poetry Prize. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in The American Journal of Poetry, I-70 Review, on Poets.org, and others. He previously served as the Assistant Poetry Editor for Willow Springs and currently teaches English and Creative Writing in Columbia, Missouri.

Lukpata Lomba is a Nigerian poet with work previously published in Jacar Press's One, South Florida Poetry Journal, Squawk Back Journal and elsewhere.

Richard Luftig is a former professor of educational psychology and special education at Miami University in Ohio now residing in California. He is a recipient of the Cincinnati Post-Corbett Foundation Award for Literature. His poems have appeared in numerous literary journals in the United States and internationally in Canada, Australia, Europe, and Asia. Two of his poems recently appeared in Ten Years of Dos Madres Press.

R. Nikolas Macioci earned a PhD from The Ohio State University. OCTELA, the Ohio Council of Teachers of English, named Nik Macioci the best secondary English teacher in the state of Ohio. Nik is the author of two chapbooks as well as seven books: More than two hundred of his poems have been published here and abroad, including The Society of Classic Poets Journal, Chiron, The Comstock Review, Concho River Review, and Blue Unicorn. Forthcoming books are Rough and Why Dance?

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Fall 2020 Dave Malone grew up in both Kansas and Missouri, where he now lives. He attended Ottawa University and later received a master’s degree in English from Indiana State University where he studied poetry under Matthew Brennan. His most recent book is You Know the Ones (Golden Antelope Press, 2017). Works have appeared in Elder Mountain: A Journal of Ozark Studies, San Pedro River Review, and Plainsongs.

DS Maolalai lives in Dublin, Ireland and has been nominated six times for Best of the Net and three times for the Pushcart Prize. His poetry has been released in two collections, Love is Breaking Plates in the Garden (Encircle Press, 2016) and Sad Havoc Among the Birds (Turas Press, 2019).

Timothy Martin lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan. His work has appeared in numerous journals, including Prairie Schooner, The Comstock Review, and RHINO. He has published two collections of verse, Stealing Hymnals from the Choir from FutureCycle Press (recipient of the publisher’s annual Book Prize), and Drowning at the Pool Party for Lifeguards from Prolific Press.

Michael McManus has published in many places, most recently the North American Journal of Poetry, and in the past the Tipton Poetry Journal, among others. He is the recipient of an Artist Fellowship Award for Literature from the Louisiana Division of the Arts and currently lives in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

Frederick Michaels writes in retirement in Indianapolis. His poetry has appeared in a variety of poetry anthologies (including several published by Brick Street Poetry, Chatter House Press and others), various on-line and printed journals around the world, and in his book Potholes in the Universe from Chatter House Press (2016).

Julie L. Moore is the author of four poetry collections, including, most recently, Full Worm Moon, which won a 2018 Woodrow Hall Top Shelf Award and received honorable mention for the Conference on Christianity and Literature's 2018 Book of the Year. A Best of the Net and five-time Pushcart Prize nominee, she has also published poetry in Alaska Quarterly Review, African American Review, Image, New Ohio Review, Poetry Daily, Prairie Schooner, The Southern Review, and Verse Daily. Her work likewise has appeared in several anthologies, including Becoming: What Makes a Woman, published by University of Nebraska Gender Programs, and Every River On Earth: Writing from Appalachian Ohio, published by Ohio University Press. Moore is an Associate Professor of English and the Writing Center Director at Taylor University, where she is the poetry editor of Relief Journal. You can learn more about her work at julielmoore.com.

Cameron Morse lives with his wife Lili and two children in Blue Springs, Missouri. His first collection, Fall Risk, won Glass Lyre Press’s 2018 Best Book Award. His latest is Baldy (Spartan Press, 2020). He serves as a poetry editor at Harbor Review.

Nancy Kay Peterson’s poetry has appeared in print and online in numerous publications, including most recently Lost Lake Folk Opera, One Sentence Poems, Spank the Carp and Three Line Poetry. From 2004-2009, she was co-publisher and co-editor of Main Channel Voices: A Dam Fine Literary Magazine. Her chapbook, Belated Remembrance, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2010. A second chapbook, Selling the Family, is due out soon. She lives in Winona, Minnesota.

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Fall 2020 Jennifer M. Phillips lives in Massachusetts. She has published poetry in quite a few poetry journals and had poems selected recently as a finalist in the White Mice Contest of the International Lawrence Durrell Society. She is equally at home in the U.K. where she was born, and the USA where she now lives, with a predilection for the Atlantic coasts cold weather, cold water, lots of green.

Kenneth Pobo is the author of 21 chapbooks and 9 full-length collections and lives in Pennsylvania. Recent books include Bend of Quiet (Blue Light Press), Loplop in a Red City (Circling Rivers), Dindi Expecting Snow (Duck Lake Books), Wingbuds (cyberwit.net), and Uneven Steven (Assure Press). Opening from Rectos Y Versos Editions is forthcoming. Human rights issues, especially as they relate to the LGBTQIA+ community, are also a constant presence in his work. In addition to poetry, he also writes fiction and essays. For the past thirty-plus years he taught at Widener University and retired in 2020.

Tom Raithel grew up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and has worked as a journalist at several newspapers in the Midwest. Recently from Evansville, Indiana, today, he lives in Cleveland, Ohio with his wife, Theresa. His poems have appeared in The Southern Review, The Comstock Review, Nimrod, Midwest Quarterly, Atlanta Review, and other journals.

Finishing Line Press has published his chapbook, Dark Leaves, Strange Light.

Mary Redman is a retired high school English teacher who currently works part time supervising student teachers for University of Indianapolis. She has had poems published in Flying Island, Red River Review, Tipton Poetry Journal, Snapdragon: A Journal of Healing, Kaleidoscope, and elsewhere. One of her poems received a Pushcart nomination in 2019.

Terry Savoie lives in Iowa and has had more than four hundred poems published both here and abroad over the past four decades. These include ones in APR, Poetry (Chicago), Ploughshares, North American Review, American Journal of Poetry and The Iowa Review as well as recent or forthcoming issues of North Dakota Quarterly, One, America, Chiron Review, and Tar River Poetry among several others. A small selection titled Reading Sunday won the Bright Hill Chapbook Competition in 2018.

Will Schmit is a Midwestern poet transplanted to Northern California. Will has been writing, and reading poetry, in between bouts of learning to play the saxophone, for nearly forty years.

Penelope Scambly Schott is a past recipient of the Oregon Book Award for Poetry. Her newest book is On Dufur Hill.

Claire Scott is an award winning poet in Oakland, California who has received multiple Pushcart Prize nominations. Her work has been accepted by the Atlanta Review, Bellevue Literary Review, New Ohio Review, Enizagam and Healing Muse among others. Claire is the author of Waiting to be Called and Until I Couldn’t. She is the co-author of Unfolding in Light: A Sisters’ Journey in Photography and Poetry.

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Tipton Poetry Journal – Fall 2020 Jeanine Stevens is the author of Limberlost and Inheritor (Future Cycle Press). Her first poetry collection, Sailing on Milkweed, was published by Cherry Grove Collections.

She is winner of the MacGuffin Poet Hunt, The Stockton Arts Commission Award, The Ekphrasis Prize and WOMR Cape Cod Community Radio National Poetry Award. Brief Immensity, won the Finishing Line Press Open Chapbook Award. Jeanine recently received her sixth Pushcart Nomination. She participated in Literary Lectures sponsored

by Poets and Writers. Work has appeared in Evansville Review, North Dakota Review, Pearl, Stoneboat, Rosebud, Chiron Review, and Forge. Jeanine studied poetry at U.C. Davis and has graduate degrees in Anthropology and Education.

Gene Twaronite is a Tucson poet and the author of nine books, including collections of poetry, short stories and essays as well as two juvenile fantasy novels. His latest book is My Life as a Sperm. Essays from the Absurd Side. Follow more of his writing @thetwaronitezone.com.

Carol Tyx lives in Iowa City, where she facilitates a prison book club, raises her voice in the community sing movement, and supports community-based agriculture. Her poetry has most recently been published in Big Muddy, Caesura, Iowa City Poetry in Public, and Remaking Achilles: Slicing into Angola’s History with Hidden River Press. Currently Tyx is the artist-in-residence at Prairiewoods eco-spirituality center. She also makes a phenomenal strawberry rhubarb pie.

Yuliia Vereta is a young writer from Ukraine, whose other works were published in Litro Magazine (UK), Genre: urban arts (USA), Penultimate Peanut Magazine (USA), Valley Voices (USA) and McGuffin (USA). Yuliia received the 2018 City of Rockingham Short Story Award (Australia) and became the finalist in Poetry Matters Project (USA) as well as Hessler Poetry Contest (USA).

Janet Jiahui Wu is a Hong-Kongese-Chinese-Australian visual artist and writer of poetry and fiction. She has published in various literary magazines such as Voiceworks, Cordite Poetry Review, Mascara Literary Review, Rabbit Poetry, Plumwood Mountain Poetry, foam:e, Tipton Poetry Journal, Yes!, Gone Lawn, and so on. She currently lives in South Australia.

Alessio Zanelli is an Italian poet who writes in English and whose work has appeared in over 170 literary journals from 16 countries. His fifth original collection, titled The Secret Of Archery, was published in 2019 by Greenwich Exchange Publishing (London). For more information please visit www.alessiozanelli.it.

James K. Zimmerman's writing appears in American Life in Poetry, Chautauqua, Nimrod, Pleiades, Salamander, and Vallum, among others. He is author of “Little Miracles” (Passager, 2015) and "Family Cookout" (Comstock, 2016), winner of the Jessie Bryce Niles Prize. He lives in Pleasantville, New York.

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