Tipton Poetry Journal #52 - Spring 2022 by Tipton Poetry Journal

Tipton Poetry Journal – Spring 2022

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. Statistics: This issue features 43 poets from the United States (15 different states), 2 poets from Ukraine, and 1 poet from India. Our Featured Poem this issue is “Sad Movie,” written by Will Dolben. Will’s poem, which also receives an award of $25, can be found on page 10. 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. Barry Harris reviews Tornado Drill by Dave Malone. Cover Photo: Baby Robins by Stephanie L. Harper. Barry Harris, Editor Copyright 2022 by the Tipton Poetry Journal. All rights remain the exclusive property of the individual contributors and may not be used without their permission. Tipton Poetry Journal is published by Brick Street Poetry Inc., a tax-exempt non-profit organization under IRS Code 501(c)(3). Brick Street Poetry Inc. publishes the Tipton Poetry Journal, hosts the monthly poetry series Poetry on Brick Street and sponsors other poetry-related events.

Tipton Poetry Journal – Spring 2022

Contents Oleg Feoktistov .......................................................................................... 1 Marjie Giffin ................................................................................................ 2 C.L. Hoang .................................................................................................... 4 Tia Paul-Louis ............................................................................................ 5 Mykyta Ryzhykh ........................................................................................ 6 Terry Savoie ................................................................................................ 8 Will Dolben ................................................................................................ 10 Norbert Krapf ........................................................................................... 11 Martha McCollough ................................................................................ 12 Mary Hills Kuck....................................................................................... 14 Ellen Skilton .............................................................................................. 16 Michael Estabrook .................................................................................. 18 Amy Suzanne Parker ............................................................................. 19 L. Annette Binder .................................................................................... 22 Betty Stanton ............................................................................................ 23 Juliet Hinton .............................................................................................. 24 Jeffrey S. Thompson ................................................................................ 26 Joe Gianotti................................................................................................ 27 Duane Anderson ...................................................................................... 28 Gene Twaronite ....................................................................................... 28 John Grey .................................................................................................... 30 Aubrey Farelli .......................................................................................... 31 Diane Kendig ............................................................................................ 32 Thomas Piekarski ................................................................................... 34 Hardarshan Singh Valia ....................................................................... 38

Tipton Poetry Journal – Spring 2022 Bruce Robinson ........................................................................................ 39 David Vancil .............................................................................................. 40 Rose Bromberg ........................................................................................ 41 Nancy Kay Peterson ............................................................................... 42 Jonathan Bracker.................................................................................... 43 Michael E. Strosahl ................................................................................. 44 John T. Leonard........................................................................................ 46 S.D. Dillon ................................................................................................... 48 Peter Grandbois....................................................................................... 48 Cameron Morse........................................................................................ 50 Akshaya Pawaskar ................................................................................. 50 Pama Lee Bennett ................................................................................... 52 Nettie Farris .............................................................................................. 53 Carol Hamilton ........................................................................................ 53 T. Dallas Saylor ........................................................................................ 54 Elaine Fowler Palencia ......................................................................... 54 George Fish................................................................................................ 56 Nolo Segundo ............................................................................................ 56 Review: Tornado Drill by Dave Malone ............................... 58 Contributor Biographies.............................................................. 63

Tipton Poetry Journal – Spring 2022

Spring Oleg Feoktistov The spring will come! Mark my words. It will be glorious. The skies will be bluer, And the yellow fields will Move slowly reflecting the Sun. Mark my words! All losses will be locked in hearts And faces will open up, Hands will work, Children will play. Mark my words! Amazing dance of life Will be heard beyond What our eyes can see. We will be heard Mark my words good people!

Oleg Feoktistov is a teacher at a local high school in Odesa, Ukraine. Oleg teaches English language and literature. His class is a special place where thirty kids learn, play, and get ready for life.

Tipton Poetry Journal – Spring 2022

The Splitting Marjie Giffin I feel a loneliness settling down upon me as I stretch my legs out on the couch and pull a book off the coffee table in search of something comforting to read. I can hear the television, voices heated, raised in argument over the January 6 insurrection. I cringe. The country is being torn apart by factions, by lies and temperaments and actions of men who’ve lost their wits and women who’re steeped in conspiracy. I want to weep when I think of all that has been lost --- civility, truth, humanity, tolerance. There is rancor born of such strident voices, elevated in ugly pitches, one against the other. Some want to protest, others secede. The nation is splitting apart at the seams. The issues are many, the passions extreme. I curl up on my couch and just try to sleep.

Tipton Poetry Journal – Spring 2022

The Station at Kharkiv Marjie Giffin The train barely visible The tracks going West unseen A throng of people stretching to the reaches of vision Jumbled and bundled together Babies in parkas hoisted high Mamas’ hands clasped tightly Row after row after row Too steep to count Too deep to comprehend Desperation an unheard shout Danger a lurking shadow Fear clearly visible

Marjie Giffin is a Midwestern writer who has authored four regional histories and whose poetry has appeared in Snapdragon, Poetry Quarterly, Flying Island, The Kurt Vonnegut Literary Journal, Saint Katherine Review, Northwest Indiana Literary Journal, Blue Heron Review, Tipton Poetry Journal, Agape Review and the anthologies The Lives We Have Live(d) and What Was and What Will Be, Leave them Something, and Reflections on Little Eagle Creek. Her work was recently featured online by the Heartland Society of Women Writers and her first chapbook, Touring, was published in 2021. She lives in Indianapolis and is active in the Indiana Writers’ Center and has taught both college writing and gifted education.

Tipton Poetry Journal – Spring 2022

Long Night * C.L. Hoang In the sticky dark the heater breathes the floor groans. I hear my brain churning over image upon searing image: hospitals aheap in rubble; pregnant women, raised to their feet, on the run; children dragging their baby luggage gripping their mothers’ hands tight; blind old man trapped in a basement listening for the deadly whistle in simmering despair; snow descending, impassive angel eerily unblemished on black body bags in the middle of the streets. A rerun in my mind of some old World War movie? V-Day, alas, is nowhere in sight. The heater breathes. The floor groans. Time tiptoes on. The night sighs.

* Following reports of a Russian airstrike on a maternity hospital in Mariupol, Ukraine

C.L. Hoang was born and raised in Vietnam during the war and came to America in the 1970's. He graduated from Ohio University and the University of California, Berkeley and earns his living in San Diego as an engineer, but dabbles in the pleasure of writing every chance he gets.

Tipton Poetry Journal – Spring 2022

Neutral Essence Tia Paul-Louis I’m comfortable this way with your body absent and my arm resting on the pillow. Air and silence have thickened into a spirit that wraps like my bare skin. It hasn’t hurt in a while when you don’t say hello. Your voice – how vacant. The losses now make sense and I almost wish to deserve them as much as you do.

Born in the Caribbean and raised in the U.S., Tia PaulLouis began writing songs at age 11, then experimented with poetry during high school. She earned a BA in English/Creative Writing from the University of South Florida along with a M.F.A in Creative Writing from National University in California. Her works have appeared in literary magazines such as The Voices Project, Ethos Literary Journal, and Rabbit Catastrophe Review. Some of her favorite authors and poets include Langston Hughes, Emily Dickinson, Maya Angelou and Edgar Allan Poe. Apart from writing, Paul-Louis enjoys music, photography, acting and cooking, though she mostly finds herself and others through poetry.

Tipton Poetry Journal – Spring 2022

If your name isn’t in Google Mykyta Ryzhykh If your name isn't in Google You don’t really exist It's nice to enter the river It's nice to go out with her It's nice to be yourself Your name really can Exist apart from you Sit down check It's nice to be on the tape News when it's not criminal Evening chronicle Imagine Your name really can Exist physically to have a body Lungs heart And the only thing he may lack In this case It's just you INRI INRI Cura te ipsum If your name isn't in Google That doesn't exist for you [This poem was first published in Literary Chernihiv]

Tipton Poetry Journal – Spring 2022

McDonald’s Mykyta Ryzhykh The street is the back of the moon In the midst of her life, McDonald's suddenly grew And it grew into something like that Which really can't exist Wander the countless roads Is this our destiny? Let's scratch the back of the head of the moon Let's walk here for a year or a month From here On both sides of the long temple McDonald's. You don't think: This city seems to want To all people and streets Did you leave him?

You don’t come home Mykyta Ryzhykh You don't come home You don't come to the neighbors You don't come to me You don't come to your senses You can't take out the trash You don't clean your ears Looks like I died Inside your head Mykyta Ryzhykh lives in Ukraine and is the winner of the international competition “Art Against Drugs,” bronze medalist of the festival Chestnut House, laureate of the literary competition named after Tutyunnik. Mykyta has been published in the journals Dzvin, Ring A, Polutona, Rechport, Topos, Articulation, Formaslov, Colon, Literature Factory, and Literary Chernihiv.

Tipton Poetry Journal – Spring 2022

Concerning the War Terry Savoie How we fought day & night, fought over the war without any end in sight, fought in our all-night bull sessions as though that non-stop wrangling might render us something more meaningful than those endless cups of coffee we drank designed to drown out our rage, our guilt. But our hearts? Yes, they beat on but the argument ended up going nowhere beyond eating us alive as all wars must inevitably do before they shuffled off to swallow the next generation & the next.

Tipton Poetry Journal – Spring 2022

Today, fewer than half of us remain who lived through that talking. Looking back, we wonder now at still being here while running on those tired & nearly spent fumes, fumes fated as we always seem to be with beginning over again & again &, yes, once again.

Terry Savoie lives in Iowa. Beyond a previous appearance in Tipton Poetry Journal, more than four hundred poems have been published in journals both here and abroad. These include APR, Ploughshares, America, Prairie Schooner, The Minnesota Review, The Montana Review, North American Review, Sonora Review and The Iowa Review.

Tipton Poetry Journal – Spring 2022

Sad Movie

Will Dolben

You enter the theater alone, pretend someone’s late to meet you. The rest of us played this game a few minutes ago— people get the wrong impression if you don’t scan the room or look confused. I assume you also like Caribbean islands, that tonight you’ll have the salmon, laugh with your husband, say you wanted him to be here. In the darkness, you tell yourself crying is strong. This is a secret club. We are all alone. When the movie ends, we stay in our seats until we look composed.

Will Dolben lives in Santa Barbara, California and holds a master's degree in writing from the University of Southern California's MPW program, now known as the MFA in Writing and Publishing at Vermont College of Fine Arts. He was a quarterfinalist in the prestigious Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences international screenwriting competition. His poetry has appeared in journals including Pioneertown, High Shelf and Triggerfish Critical Review.

Tipton Poetry Journal – Spring 2022

Shooting Hoosier Hoops Norbert Krapf Sometimes I’m on the playground of the grade school playing horse by myself flinging up shots and the touch comes back and the ball spins oh just right and it’s all net baby, all net again. I swoop in a three even before there is such a thing. Yeah, I want to be just as damn good as awesome Oscar Robertson and there’s a crowd in my head screaming and yelling me on… Just before the final gun claps loud my long one soars into the sky and rattles into the hoop and the net rips and wow! The crowd goes wild again and I’m King of Hoosier Hoops and every soul in town knows who I am. I can pull up in my convertible fairly late at night and park and walk into the Dairy Queen and be given the best, most over-loaded butterscotch banana split in the universe and girls want to cruise around town with me. Then it’s late and I’m in the barnyard where there’s a hoop and I’m home playing against myself with just one dim lightbulb. I shoot by feel and after the ball leaves my fingertips I hear repeats of the same sweet late-night swish.

Norbert Krapf, former Indiana Poet Laureate, will have his fifteenth poetry collection, Spirit Sister Dance, and his Homecomings: A Writer's Memoir, published this year. He received the Lucille Medwick Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, received a Creative Renewal Fellowship from the Indy Arts Council to combine poetry and the blues, and has a poem in stained-glass at the Indy International Airport. For more, see http://www.krapfpoetry.net/.

Tipton Poetry Journal – Spring 2022

Difficulty Martha McCollough 1.

call it a slammed door a monotone hallway eye parched by implacable rhythms page: a thorny orchard we are secretive velvet draped over knobby scaffolding heart: a flattened supermarket rose what did you expect

why did I seek you out your mental chess your complex equations your petulant endnotes one day I’ll be sorry but now you should stop talking

Tipton Poetry Journal – Spring 2022 3.

the day is a casual reader misinterpreting the light on the table grasses of forgetfulness identify the source if you can—I’ve been asleep too long the book half under the bed is wide awake & preaching to the cats

Detective in Night Town Martha McCollough Pull one thread this burg unwinds. The buildings lean over the street, sneering. Everybody’s got a gat, a tommygun, a derringer. Questions disrupt the churn of the greed-greased machine; gears grind and spark, the money stops circulating. Soon there’s a cops-and-robbers war going, complete with explosions—at the bank, at the whisky warehouse. No one cares about his case anymore, least of all him. He only wants to get out of this town in one piece, make this story come out right. He files a report from the ruins. Hard to say if it’s true: pretty much everyone’s dead by the end.

Martha McCollough is a writer living in Amherst, Massachusetts. She has an MFA in painting from Pratt Institute. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Bear Review, Tammy, Pangyrus, Barrelhouse, Crab Creek Review, and Salamander, among others. Her chapbook, Grandmother Mountain was published by Blue Lyra Press. Martha's poetry collection, Wolf Hat Iron Shoes, is available from Lily Poetry Review Books.

Tipton Poetry Journal – Spring 2022

Snowdrops Mary Hills Kuck No one told the snowdrops not to cluster close together when they poked their heads above the ground next to the maple tree beside the shed. They held each other up with slender leaves and gently opened out their milky petals, clumped like Mother’s curls. Today there was no melting snow that would remind them of the vigil’s coming end; they popped up through old leaves that snuggled them until they could no longer wait to sing, Surprise! Can you see that spring has come? Their paean’s short, but sweetens every ear.

Madelyn and the Resurrection of the Body

Mary Hills Kuck This body? You’ve got to be kidding. With its fragile heart, aching joints, belly out of sync with the food that goes in, drippy nose, dry skin, and scars, scars, scars. No. Who would want this body sent back to life, having found its long-sought rest, joining bit by bit the warm, leafy loam? Not me. I’d like a new one.

Tipton Poetry Journal – Spring 2022 Yet —this old body knows the joy of a good night’s sleep, the cheer of a splendid meal, the glow of a gentle touch, the ecstasy of love. . . a swing with a bat gone wrong, a bicycle much too big, an angered greedy dog, a skinned knee not quite healed, the deeper, secret scars. The body keeps the record. Would I want to start again without the history it holds, the wisdom gathered, etched in pain and bliss? Even Jesus kept his wounds, healed but still with scars. So if the miracle comes to me, go ahead, raise these bones. But could you mend the flesh?

Mary Hills Kuck has retired from teaching English and German in the US and Jamaica and now lives in Massachusetts with her family. She has received a Pushcart Prize nomination and has published in a number of journals, including the Connecticut River Review, SLANT, Tipton Poetry Journal, Burningword Literary Journal, From the Depths, Splash, Poetry Quarterly, Main Street Rag, and others. Her chapbook, Intermittent Sacraments, was published in June, 2021, by Finishing Line Press.

Tipton Poetry Journal – Spring 2022

The Widower’s Wife Ellen Skilton I will be somebody’s mother somehow, I said, a jagged, gorgeous prophecy. Another woman whose name I know had to give birth, relinquish, smother her feelings so I could mother. And now as the widower’s wife, I devour a reprise of that same tart/sweet taste — a rhubarb pie of uneasy delight. I find I have endless room for dessert but my husband can still taste bitter chemo herbs on his tongue — that aftertaste laces our kisses, transforming to a tender tartness I know so well. Another woman whose name I know had to suffer, cease, become unmated so I could be fully sated. And I wonder — when hawk families sit down to dinner after a long day at the office, do they think about who died so they could end up so full, not an ounce of room for dessert. The mother hawk does that thinking while the children just ask for seconds. She knows the horror of roadkill she’s turned into a family feast and yet she savors seconds too. Her kettle of eyas with voices overlapping huddle in a cozy temporal sweetness that she’ll long for again later in her arthritic wings — hungering for more.

Tipton Poetry Journal – Spring 2022 On Mother’s Day, always another mother in the shadows of my mind weeping. On our anniversary, always another wife, an almost-welcomed guest. After-dinner drinks smooth the edges — love, straight up, with a twist of grief. [This poem was first published by Poet’s Choice]

Ellen Skilton is a Philadelphia-based poet, but she has deep ties to the Midwest. Born in Iowa City, her first years were in Tipton, Iowa and she attended college in Richmond, Indiana. Her mother's family were farmers in rural Missouri. Her poetry has appeared in The Dewdrop, Cathexis Northwest Press, The Scapegoat Review, Dissident Voice, Philadelphia Stories, Tofu Ink Arts Press, Drunk Monkeys and The Dillydoun Review. In addition to being a poet, she is an educational anthropologist, an applied linguist and a Fringe Fest performer. She just completed an MFA in Creative Writing at Arcadia University.

Tipton Poetry Journal – Spring 2022

Acrophobia Michael Estabrook . . . she tells me losing a son is worse than losing a husband she tells me stay off the damn ladder . . . Realized I had acrophobia when I was 12 years old paused at the top of a Ferris wheel with Billy Hunt and Bobby Wargo begging them to stop wiggling around like demented monkeys which of course they couldn’t. Haven’t been on a Ferris wheel since and never been on a roller coaster and I’m 73 years old. The grandchildren are incredulous over this news and desperate to get me on one before I shuffle off my mortal coil.

Michael Estabrook has been publishing his poetry in the small press since the 1980s. He has published over 20 collections, a recent one being The Poet’s Curse, A Miscellany (The Poetry Box, 2019). He lives in Acton, Massachusetts.

Tipton Poetry Journal – Spring 2022

COVID Poem, or “Just Stay Alive” I.

Amy Suzanne Parker

First, I became liquid sloshing in a toilet bowl. My once-hibiscus-pink lips bloomed blue. I convulsed with cold, smothered myself in blankets. At the walk-in, a fever christened me at 102 degrees. My pulse was 150— my heart is a drunk hummingbird. In the ambulance, the paramedic gave me two doses of medicine to slow it down to 125. I felt it flutter, try to fly out of the cage of my chest. II. How do you stop your body from killing itself? Years of self-abuse and COVID raise the levels of my liver enzymes. Mom died of liver failure. I am afraid and only 35. She was 67. They said it was the Tylenol, not the psych meds. The way she popped them like PEZ for her headaches. The doctors assure me that I am recovering and leave my bodily functions unexplained. I forbid myself from doing the math— it’s how I sleep at night. That and the Trazodone. I wear her ring. It’s starting to slide off my finger. I turned into her, inheriting her body all over again. My abdomen inflates with ascites. I look eight months pregnant, she said, toward the end. I’ve never been pregnant, only with myself. I was an April baby, but Easter always arrives too soon. I can’t help but resurrect, like my grandpa did at 67 after his cirrhosis. It’s what my body does, regenerate, a starfish.

Tipton Poetry Journal – Spring 2022 III. In the hospital, a nurse needled me in the arm. My blood spilled onto the bedsheet, forming a heart. My IV bruises are storm clouds. With my mask on, my breath fogs my glasses, and COVID fogs my brain. It’s snowing outside, and the heat inside mists up the windows. I could write a poem on glass. It’s another grayscale day in Binghamton, and I’m dying again with the seasons. My body absorbs the grayness, tires easily. Winter is a leech sucking and suckling, depending on its hunger. It wasn’t always this way. IV. Persephone knows the distance between a sun and a star. Maps of space turn black into white. If I know heaven, it burns like potassium in an IV. They tell me to eat bananas. An apple a day, they say. But for the queen of Hell, the world is too congested for pomegranates. The seeds stick in her teeth long after she bites. A goddess cannot subsist on fruit alone. V. How do you slow your heart when it’s always fighting? There’s a song with my name on it whose refrain is “just stay alive.” This weather scarred me, and my body wants revenge on itself. When I first learned about homeostasis in my mother’s nursing textbooks, I laughed. Isn’t the body always under attack? If Disney World taught me anything… I try to go home, return to equilibrium. Now, the green in Florida shocks me every time I visit, that things can still stay alive in December.

Tipton Poetry Journal – Spring 2022

Lithium is for Lovers

Amy Suzanne Parker I’ve been there, got a t-shirt. I decorate my apartment with empty orange bottles. I am tempted to fill them with wax, make them candles, a shrine to all the meds I’ve loved before. Some facial deformity says I’m from there. Is it my crooked teeth, my chicken pox scar? The slight twitch of tardive dyskinesia when I smile. One of my eyes is smaller than the other. Yesterday I realized it has been twenty years, measured in yellowed linoleum, dusty diaries, the forecasts of old CVS receipts. Can you read the abuse somewhere on my face? The psychic I saw last January said in a year’s time I’d have a baby boy; my mom would be okay. But she got the abuse right. I paid her eighty dollars, and my boots crunched in the snow. I drove off, fearing the worst. I measured the year in pills and blood tests. Shades of pink and creamsicle have passed through my mouth, a place of worship. My body is a temple smashed, looted. Shards of stained glass splinter my thoughts. I’m a bloody tongue with a busted tooth. A root canal, a crown, a filling. I am building an empire of enamel. I close my mouth to smile. If you want to know how I feel, take too much and live. You’ll see where I’ve been. Amy Suzanne Parker is a PhD candidate at Binghamton University in New York, where she studies English and Creative Writing. Her work has appeared in Juked, Hobart, DIAGRAM, Pithead Chapel, Burrow Press Review. Originally from the Tampa Bay Area, she loves a good storm.

Tipton Poetry Journal – Spring 2022

Lacuna L. Annette Binder The losses accumulate and the world constricts until the possibilities resolve to nothing but the moment you have together. Grace is the medicine lost or forgotten or left in the fridge. Grace is the hours spent on hold with insurers and receptionists and all the things you forgot to do and remember when you are in bed sleepless. It is the deer beside the road as you drive together to the doctor and the nickname nobody else uses and if she leaves she will take it with her and part of you will be lost, too, but not yet because she knows it still and it sounds like grace when she calls you by your name. There is so much beauty you feel obliged to show her, look look at the sky, at the tiger lilies by the wall and the grass bending and the strange yellow bird perched atop the tree, look, look, you say, and grace rises then like water from a well, it rises and fills the empty spaces.

L. Annette Binder was born in Germany and immigrated to the US as a child. Poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Stone, Town Creek Poetry, and JMWW. She lives in New Hampshire with her family.

Tipton Poetry Journal – Spring 2022

Breaking Betty Stanton It happens every morning before sunrise when you leave hours before I have expected you to, slipping away when you remember you are late for work, for a morning meeting, or to call your wife and I find myself downtown alone trying to keep pace with ghosts of old lovers, they come at me dressed like ghosts in fraternity tee-shirts, running shoes. They want something from me. Something small and fragile, something private that I am always letting go. A withered man on the stoop plays the trumpet just like Herb Alpert's little Spanish flea – humming, I move too slowly to catch the beat of woman's voice next to me lilting across coffee cups. Your face there so casually across from mine that I would cry out, except that my mouth has better things to do. Like your body spread out over coffee cups and pastries. Later it makes you want to kiss me when I scrape my fingernails across your knuckles, your shattered breath, before we move apart. I forget the spice of your sweat, your skin and the way we slip together. Pieces from mismatched puzzles, we have sanded ourselves to fit, sharp edges made smooth with blood, sweat. Here, you say, slide in, and between us the car idles. Leaning to open my door stretches time, whole hours dark across your skin. We wonder which of us will move first. [Originally published in When Women Waken, Issue 7 (Being), 2015.]

Betty Stanton is a writer who lives and works in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in various journals and collections and has been included in anthologies from Dos Gatos Press and Picaroon Poetry Press. She received her MFA from The University of Texas at El Paso.

Tipton Poetry Journal – Spring 2022

Chernobyl Leaves Juliet Hinton I remember when the alabaster sun fell out of the sky and all the crops turned into ash, the trees became seasonless overnight; 20, 000 years until they would be habitable by the birds and the air again did not taste like soot. Children were not allowed outside unless we wrapped them in plastic; they looked like locusts with those plastic hoods and wiry cords. My father wept in his cupped hands so, we could not see his tears. "We were once forest people," he kept repeating as if that could woo the trees back. But even though the government promised to bring them back; there were no treetops left for us to claim or hewn or barks to dance around. From our shutterless dormer we could only see dying sunflowers and leaves that looked like flocks of blackbirds.

Tipton Poetry Journal – Spring 2022

Wedding Rings and Chicken Wire Dredging

Juliet Hinton My babysitter was not the most gracious lady in Perry County often given to bouts of hysteria and hilarity. She could lose her temper, way too easily. But she liked the outdoors and took me and her kids, a menagerie of brutes, to play in the Bogue Homa one afternoon. We laughed and splashed each other until we heard her scream, strong enough to turn the sunlight day into a stormy one filled with threatening tornadoes. She had lost her diamond ring; it had slipped as easily off her finger as the swear words we heard her say and which my mother said were not part of a lady's vocabulary. But my babysitter was in no mood to be polite, and her rough cries caught the attention of two fishermen who rushed toward her to see if she had been bitten by a diamond head or a moccasin. Her fear was worse. Her third wedding ring was lost. Luckily, the men were skilled in the art of chicken wire dredging, and they pulled a roll of it from their sack of stream-side equipment and began pulling it back and forth in the Bogue Homa, up and down, shifting and shifting the wire until the grains of sand that held the ring finally gave it up. The diamond rose to the top of the stream which reminded me of the old woman in the Bible who searched her house, turning it upside down to find a small lost coin. But my babysitter was not a Biblical woman and the two ring diggers were more at home with a pint of Jack or some chew than catching fish which held sacred truths in their mouths.

Juliet Hinton graduated from William Carey University with a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration in 1999 and MBA in 2000. Certified Tumor Registrar managerial and strategic planning service at Forrest General Hospital in Hattiesburg, Mississippi for over twenty years. She partners with the American Cancer Society to offer events and grants to fulfill the needs of the Pine Belt community and collaborates with the FGH Foundation on projects to improve care, and with other groups to improve the cancer patient’s journey at FGH and in the community. She received a Pushcart Nomination for her poem “Calvary Baptist Church”. She is currently working on more Perry County and landscape poems, and a new project on oncology cancer care, and research and informatics.

Tipton Poetry Journal – Spring 2022

Father’s Day Jeffrey S. Thompson for Dr. Stanley D. Thompson

Pronghorns are not antelope and bison aren’t buffalo. Use a yellow filter for greater contrast, especially in the sky. You can wash your hair with a bar of soap, it’s basically the same stuff as shampoo. Lie on your right side if you’re feeling nauseated. Let everybody off the elevator before you get on. First place the print in the developer for ninety seconds, agitate the tray gently so the print is always covered with fluid. The image should start to appear at around fifteen seconds. Make sure you own a navy blue blazer, it works for any occasion. You can’t con an honest man. Take the tongs and lift the print out of the tray, let it drain, then place it in the stop-bath for thirty seconds. Be aware of your surroundings. For instance on the Jones Creek Trail, the south-facing slopes are bare, they get the direct sunlight, the north-facing slopes are wooded. If it seems too good to be true, it probably is. Let the print drain again before placing it in the fixer for five minutes. Daddy longlegs aren’t spiders and spiders are not insects. If all else fails, read the directions. That man always looking through magazines at the Stop & Go—don’t stare—it’s called neurofibromatosis, tumors grow uncontrollably on the nerves. There is no treatment. Wash the print under running water for ten minutes, then hang to dry. Walk facing the traffic. Badlands cedar is a misnomer, they’re actually junipers. Touch up any white specks with India ink. No, they generally won’t give you meds for abdominal pain, they don’t want to mask its source. Pronghorns are curious animals, always wanting another look, that’s how the hunters get them.

Jeffrey S. Thompson was raised in Fargo, North Dakota, and educated at the University of Iowa and Cornell Law School. He lives and works in Phoenix, Arizona. At Iowa he participated in undergraduate poetry workshops and had a couple poems published in small journals. He pursued a career in public interest law, but recently decided to start sharing his work again. Thompson was named a finalist for the 2021 Iowa Review Poetry Award, and has been published or accepted at Neologism Poetry Journal, North Dakota Quarterly, The Main Street Rag, and Passengers Journal.

Tipton Poetry Journal – Spring 2022

Confidence Girl Joe Gianotti You swipe your hair backward and forward, pull your necklace from skin to shirt as you perform Billie Eilish into your phone. You hold an invisible mic to your beaming mouth, and expand your lungs from the diaphragm and sing soul into poetry. Your dazed sun-soaked eyes a part of the vocal ensemble, a crescendo that forces you to pump your fist and spread your fingers. You bring them down against yourself as Billie changes tempos, weapons to wield against those who ruined everything good. Your stage now a litter box, constriction, singing over conversations, but the Metro awaits. Throngs will push in as you belt the high note and make all the moments your own. Joe Gianotti has taught English at Lowell High School in Northwest Indiana for twenty-five years. He is from Whiting, a small, blue collar, industrial town just outside Chicago. He studied English, history, and education at the University of Indianapolis and Purdue University. His poetry has been published or is forthcoming in This, Literary Magazine, The Chaffey Review, Steam Ticket, The Tipton Poetry Journal, and other places, as well as collected in the second volume of This is Poetry: The Midwest Poets.

Tipton Poetry Journal – Spring 2022

First Worm of Spring Duane Anderson After the rains of last night, worms crawl on the streets and sidewalks this morning. I try not to step on them, especially the dew worms, but it is not so easy zig zagging that way. If the police were to see me they would have me arrested. Maybe I should turn myself in anyway. Duane Anderson currently lives in La Vista, Nebraska, and volunteers with a non-profit organization as a Donor Ambassador on their blood drives. He has had poems published in The Pangolin Review, Fine Lines, The Sea Letter, Cholla Needles, Tipton Poetry Journal, Adelaide Literary Magazine and several other publications.

Working on My Signature Gene Twaronite An author signs a book to affirm the life within. Written in subconscious code, it is the soul’s imprimatur. Note the perfectly formed letters in Virginia Woolf’s signature, wholly legible as if meant to show a balanced soul never at war with itself.

Tipton Poetry Journal – Spring 2022 What complexities lurk in the signature of Edgar Allan Poe, who adorned his letters with loops and dots, underlined beneath like a swirling maelstrom. But why write the whole thing out? E.E. Cummings, ever the nonconformist, signed with just his initials, this time capitalized. Emily Dickinson used only her first name, her misshapen letters spaced wide apart, the ending “y” snaking beneath like a lake of solitude. Pity she never got to autograph her book. See how Billy Collins simplifies, snipping out unnecessary letters, opening his “B” with a short vertical line and a drunken sideways “3” followed by more vertical lines and occasional dots, the rest a wave breaking gently on a welcoming shore. So I’m working on my signature, writing in code a squiggly line I hope will give me its blessing.

Gene Twaronite is the author of four collections of poetry as well as the rhyming picture book How to Eat Breakfast. His first poetry book Trash Picker on Mars, published by Kelsay Books, was the winner of the 2017 New Mexico-Arizona Book Award for Arizona poetry. His newest poetry collection Shopping Cart Dreams will be published by Kelsay Books in 2022. Gene’s poems have been described as: “ranging from edgy to whimsical to inscrutable … playfully haunting and hauntingly playful.” A former New Englander, Gene now lives in Tucson. Follow more of his poetry at genetwaronite.poet.com or https://www.instagram.com/genetwaronitepoetry/.

Tipton Poetry Journal – Spring 2022

Camping in New Hampshire John Grey The night rolled in without hesitation, consumed my tent, the tiny patch of ground I claimed for my makeshift terrace. Now, every bird is a blackbird. All the trees are black birch. That is until they’re no longer trees at all but part of this vast, seamless entity called black forest. But my heart beats excitedly. My head is full of imagining. My nerves don’t tremble. They are eager to be part of their surrounds. It’s time to light a fire, one like the fire in me.

John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident now living in Rhode Island, recently published in Sheepshead Review, Stand, Poetry Salzburg Review and Hollins Critic. Latest books, Leaves On Pages Memory Outside The Head and Guest Of Myself are available through Amazon. Work upcoming in Ellipsis, Blueline International Poetry Review.

Tipton Poetry Journal – Spring 2022

Pieces of Me Aubrey Farelli I keep everything I own Can’t seem to throw it away It all has some sentimental value Every item is part of my past Therefore, I can’t let it go I have already lost so much This causes me problems though I know it’s a mess but it’s my mess Still, I can’t have any company over I fear what they might think of it all Sometimes the clutter makes me anxious But how could I throw these memories away? When they are pieces of me

Aubrey Farelli is a student at Erie Community College who lives in Depew, New York. She is a new and emerging writer.

Tipton Poetry Journal – Spring 2022

Still Singing Everything Diane Kendig In response to Joy Harjo Oh, Joy, we have been too long on the road with radio, Spotify, Sirius—seriously! The moneyed music, not much attuned to tunes, it’s true, for planting, for growing, for harvesting. But children still sing how row by row gonna make our garden grow and band kids on buses still sing a hundred bottles of beer: there’s our getting drunk song. My father sang everything he knew all day from his days when his family of thirteen got kicked off the farm to the streets of Massillon and Canton, the one about roses he was chosen to sing as a teen, then all the army songs, and everything in the metal case of seventy-eights: lyrics or no: we all wah-wahed The Basin Street Blues. He sent us to camp, where we learned a round about loving rolling hills and daffodils, taught it to him when we came home. His last two long days of shouting in pain with no relief since hospice wasn’t around on weekends, he finally slipped into silence for two more days and nights, when I sang everything to him, especially the one about coming to the garden alone the first night. The second night, I made friends with the silence without him. No other has ever known.

Tipton Poetry Journal – Spring 2022

Finally Getting Emily Dickinson Diane Kendig Setting out this morning to light my lamp, but switching it on low to read, and at that, number 511, I see she and I share the same— what? the critics say anxiety, I say the same— abeyance, or stay—a statement against not knowing, or, as she was known for, no hoping. I look up “ghost bees” from line 19, find they flit for real and not just for metaphor. These days, they’re sighted only in Arizona or around it, not in Massachusetts, making me wonder if in other days, Plath’s dad, the old bee-man studied them. So I sit here, astounded, having respected not loving Dickinson, and I am loving her, go on to read 883, turn up the lamp to type or, as she says, stimulate a wick, and if my circumference shines not nearly as wide as the two Bay state girls’, still I sit in their circle and write.

Diane Kendig’s latest book is Woman with a Fan. Her writing has appeared in J Journal, Wordgathering, Valparaiso Review, and other journals. She ran a prison writing workshop in Ohio for 18 years, and now curates the Cuyahoga County (Ohio) Public Library weblog, Read + Write. Her website is dianekendig.com .

Tipton Poetry Journal – Spring 2022

Ice Cream Pie Thomas Piekarski 1. If it's nothing to you it's nothing. If it's nothing to me it's everything. Nothing plus everything nets entropy. Entropy minus eternity equals self. Diurnal excursions included. Nocturnal incisions blind. Whims make final decisions. Maritime dreams exercised. Rationalization bleeds nations. International the pandemonium. Pain rendered superfluous. Every resurrection a death. Death polices death. Life packed in ice. Saints marching in. Open the pearly gates. 2. It skims the mind’s universe, a tiny mote of remembrance that sails indefinitely through fields of genetic telepathy from one generation to next cancelling wrote conclusions science has formerly verified to homo sapiens conjoined with love hate and wonder. Piercing lucent membranes on the way to nature's temple flora man and animal spawn injecting mutable cadences that defy both time and space replacing what is and isn’t

Tipton Poetry Journal – Spring 2022 and was once under the sun with something quite unique and at times revolutionary. Invisible the locomotion applying constant pressure from without and within mini waves through which we’re hurled unprepared so labor to comprehend silent incantations raining throughout the universal psyche that reigns supreme. 3. If you were to flee where would you go? Gay Paree? Ancient Rome? Back to mother's arms out of harm's way, or into the sunset on a silver sleigh? Once made escape what would you utter, hip-hip hooray or oops what a blunder? Either way maybe inclined to run your pants up a flagpole so that you'll feel whole, or perhaps hitch a ride on a pink ocelot and dance with angels atop frosty Mont Blanc, then report to the world what freedom tenders when streaming dreams delight in their splendor. 4.

Tipton Poetry Journal – Spring 2022 The homeless are forlorn souls, their sobbing hearts own chagrin whose lives often fall at the drop of a hat like flimsy card houses and ignored by greater society. Yet we like electrified ants interminably rushed, frenzied, our individualism established, plugged in but wired for hype, bamboozled by a sold-out media, and plumbing confusion’s depths demur expecting pat answers to materialize in broad daylight. 5. As our astonishing new interstellar telescope probes billions of years through a vast universe it faithfully records that which transpired considerably prior to Earth's existence. Looking back countless eons before homo sapiens tread upon this bright blue orb our only home we would see voluminous hot volcanic rock thrust from its core scorch the surface.

Tipton Poetry Journal – Spring 2022 Projecting ahead volcanic rock will once again sear Earth's skin but first our precious atmosphere will be burned off and life consumed. Volcanic rock spewed everywhere and then the globe engulfed in one

Thomas Piekarski is a former editor of the California State Poetry Quarterly. His poetry has appeared in such publications as Poetry Quarterly, Literature Today, Poetry Salzburg, South African Literary Journal, Modern Literature, and others. His books of poetry are Ballad of Billy the Kid, Monterey Bay Adventures, Mercurial World, and Aurora California.

Tipton Poetry Journal – Spring 2022

Indiana Dunes Hardarshan Singh Valia When giant hands of glacier scoured a bowl in Paleozoic rocks you rushed to occupy it as if following a divine order, and held on to the retreating glacier while filling bosom with a sea of fresh water. A gatherer by nature you ended up providing shelter for all in and around the shore and watched silently the life blossoming amidst the industrial roar while teeming cities competing to touch the sky. After a long haul of the glaciation, it’s time to celebrate the arrival of the season of interglacial period with country fair, rides, corn-on-the cob, funnel cake, and under the moonlit sky, watch the Theater on the Lake presents The Sanctity and the Vulnerability of life.

Hardarshan Singh Valia is an earth scientist by profession living in Highland, Indiana. His poems have appeared in Wards Literary Journal, Northwest Indiana Literary Journal, Poetic Medicine, Who Writes Short Shorts, Dove Tales – Writing for Peace- an anthology, Pages Penned in Pandemic – A Collective, Caesura, Sage-ing, Literary Veganism, Right Hand Pointing, COVID tales journal, Poetry and Covid, and Nightingale & Sparrow.

Tipton Poetry Journal – Spring 2022

Henry’s Room Bruce Robinson ~ With all of their eyes, animals behold openness. — Rilke, eighth elegy (Alfred Corn, tr)

When the wind blows the door closed and shuts Henry inside the bathroom, he’s perhaps reminded of the mystery of the shrewd proviso, or concerned about the erstwhile inviolability of potions and admonishments inimical to cats. But the room is cool, there is, you’ll understand, a breeze, and when he looks outside through the screen window there’s the moon, the moon fortunate to have caught Henry’s eye, although when he looks away, it’s gone: The moon has a lunar agenda. Not much to do in a locked bathroom, not for a cat anyway, although let's be clear, Henry can and, he's done it, close that door, unaided, with ease. Perhaps he settles down on the window sill, catches a glimpse of the re-emerging moon, and then an early-rising lark or squirrel. There’s a ticking clock in the corner, but Henry, per our learning, can't or won't tell time. We know, though, the sky's still dark, the noises in the house are few. Now what? Hunker down and ponder those incoherent certainties that cover all our moments? It may be he understands so little of this; please, tell me, if we do. Recent work by Bruce Robinson appears or is forthcoming in Tar River Poetry, Spoon River, Rattle, Oddball, New World Writing, Parliament, and the Loud Coffee Press Flower-Shaped Bullet anthology. He lives in Brooklyn, New York. Henry, unfortunately, died toward the end of April, after a short illness.

Tipton Poetry Journal – Spring 2022

The Fifth Columnist David Vancil Khanh, the district’s chief interpreter, is friendly and handsome with movie star looks. He wears his pants pegged and shirts tapered. I don’t trust him. He inquires too often of my comings and goings. He likes telling me I’ve barely escaped with my life—the VC had waited at the crossroads. “You’re lucky, Lieutenant. Aren’t you afraid you’ll die?” I shrug as if it doesn’t matter, never bothering to make an answer. In the final days of my tour, the district advisor, Captain S, tells me he suspects Khanh too. There’s something off—he’s just too perfect. How can you trust someone like that? Who does he think he’s fooling? Years later, I’ll learn Khanh fought valiantly beside my one-time captain, who stood on the strut of a helicopter firing his M16 until the barrel burned. I see it like a movie in my mind, Khanh acting brave, laughing, teeth white. When I’m a civilian, I’ll dream that Khanh tracked me down in my town. He’s come to tell me he’s brought me a gift from Vietnam. He’ll smile.

David Vancil is retired from the faculty of Indiana State University. His work has appeared in small periodicals, critical reviews, and a few anthologies. As well, he is the author of four poetry collections. War and Its Discontents, a collection of military poems centered on family service and his own time in the U.S. Army, will be published by Angelina River Press sometime in 2022. He is at work on a collection of new and selected poems, which he hopes to publish no later than 2023. David lives in Terre Haute, Indiana, with his wife, three cats, and a dog.

Tipton Poetry Journal – Spring 2022

Alternate Universe Rose Bromberg (for Teddy, 2021)

In the news, eight are killed in Indianapolis when a gunman opens fire in a FedEx facility before turning the gun on himself. The coronavirus rages in Michigan, multiple cases and hospitalizations daily — some of the worst outbreaks in the nation. My grandnephew is not yet three. His bevy of blond curls bounce as he runs barefoot, back and forth from one side of the patio to the other sings ‘choo-choo’ … ‘choo-choo’, croons to the shrill sound of an imaginary whistle pulls the emergency cord on his imaginary train forces a full stop in the middle of Anywhere, U.S.A. — oblivious to family and the world around him. The day begins to vanish. I see only shrinking light from sun, moon rising as Earth continues its daily spin under sky. Rose Bromberg is the author of two poetry chapbooks whose themes span the world of nature and the field of medicine: The Language of Seasons (Finishing Line Press, 2018) and Poemedica (Finishing Line Press, 2011), which was a finalist in FLP’s Poetry Chapbook Competition. Rose is a Pushcart Prize nominee and her work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies such as RUNE (The MIT Journal of Arts and Letters), Medscape J Med., Bridges, Southern Indiana Review, Tipton Poetry Journal, rock & sling and elsewhere. She lives in Florida.

Tipton Poetry Journal – Spring 2022

Trying to Come Up with Distracting Conversation

Nancy Kay Peterson

The only time my sister ever accused me of driving too slow, was when we picked my mother up at the hospital and drove her past the gas station she no longer used because she had to stop driving, the sales site of the manufacturer that built my parents pre-fab retirement home, the bar that had an annual pig roast and cow chip throwing contest, the trailer court they’d lived in when they came for pre-retirement visits, the home-grown, prime rib restaurant where Dad loved the relish tray, the dam whose lights they could see from their picture window, the newly black-topped driveway, leading to her home, my sister's vacation trailer next door, the harbor where they’d moor the fishing boat, the bar, now exotic dance club, where they'd eat weekend buffets, the trees where eagles soared, and we crossed over the river past the restaurant where we’d celebrate Mother's Day, through the town and up the hill, to the small, tidy nursing home where every time we come to visit she asks if we've come to drive her home. Nancy Kay Peterson’s poetry has appeared in print and online in numerous publications, most recently in Dash Literary Journal, HerWords, Last Stanza Poetry Journal, One Sentence Poems, Spank the Carp, Steam Ticket, Tipton Poetry Journal and Three Line Poetry. From 2004-2009, she co-edited and copublished Main Channel Voices: A Dam Fine Literary Magazine (Winona, Minnesota). Finishing Line Press published her two poetry chapbooks, Belated Remembrance (2010) and Selling the Family (2021). For more information, see www.nancykaypeterson.com.

Tipton Poetry Journal – Spring 2022

Figure Study, From The Back Jonathan Bracker Fairly thin tracks of hair Each side the back of his neck Lead into a recent neat trim. Under long-sleeved Oxford shirt Shoulders shift as he reads, Right hand tapping forehead a bit. There is warmth in his upper torso Above the chair section it tops. A thick beaded belt brightly colored Half hides the label of still-dark Levis Cupping slight buttocks: A 20-year-old studying In a Catholic university library reading room. The magazine he studies is in Spanish. Probably this person is from a happy, large, Well-to-do family from a foreign country And is genuinely pleased With the opposite sex. Elbows planted, he raises magazine into air. This Friday or Saturday night, the power In those shoulders may perhaps be drawn upon. Clean dark hair caps his head. When he was a boy His parents most likely stroked it.

Poems by Jonathan Bracker have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry Northwest, Southern Poetry Review, and other periodicals, and in eight collections, the latest of which, from Seven Kitchens Press, is Attending Junior High. He lives in San Francisco.

Tipton Poetry Journal – Spring 2022

Breakfast of the Recently Singled Man Michael E. Strosahl Orange juice, from the container, snacking on slices of pepperoni from the bag (toss a couple to the dog who follows every step) while the pan heats up a double pat of real butter, melting it evenly across the metal. Two eggs, no four, cracked to a sizzle, shells tossed on the counter, salt and fresh ground pepper, fried until whites bubbly, then mangled with the pancake flipper, yokes broken and bleeding, heat coagulated, a delicious mess. Because who cares what it looks like? Who is there to see it’s not pretty: sunny-side up, over-easy, even pre-scrambled to a perfect yellow rather than these orange and white uneven splotches.

Tipton Poetry Journal – Spring 2022 Another pat to clog that last clear artery and they slide easily to a plate (fork off a portion into the dogs bowl as he runs forward to gobble the offering). A slice of cheddar and to the couch, flipping on the tube— mostly for noise— seat reclined, feet up, (the dog comes to huddle close, hoping for another blessing, noticing she is not there to shoo him away) cutting into that first bite— too hot as it bounces and sears tongue and roof, tumbled cool enough to swallow with another swig of orange juice, from the container, that somehow soothes the burn, makes the hurt go away.

Michael E. Strosahl is a midwestern river-born poet, originally from Moline, Illinois, now living in Jefferson City, Missouri. Besides several appearances in the Tipton Poetry Journal, Maik’s work has appeared in Flying Island, Bards Against Hunger projects, on buses, in museums and online at indianavoicejournal, poetrysuperhighway and projectagentorange. Maik also has a weekly poetry column at the online blog Moristotle & Company.

Tipton Poetry Journal – Spring 2022

Seasons John T. Leonard 1. Something fluttered in the dawning; traces of stars, the splintered bones of what could have been a planet. The rising sun reminded you of a flock of x-rays piercing through a dying fire. Your entire life floated out with the tide. Nothing outsmarts gravity, your father once said. It was late October, 4 am, on a pebble beach in Maine. 2. I’m standing on a green carpet, waiting out the day like I’ve waited out most of my days, overwhelmed by a stillness which continues to stalk me. It traces my footsteps when I sneak to the woodshed for a smoke. I hear it in the next aisle over while I’m grocery shopping; loudly drumming its fingers to the insectile buzz of fluorescent lighting, waiting impatiently while I choose my off brand of frozen peas. It huffs, face half hidden behind a trashy magazine, while I stand in the checkout line at Kroger. It jogs beside my car in the rain, always keeping pace.

Tipton Poetry Journal – Spring 2022 3. There is a chemical so rare that it can only be found tucked somewhere in the shadows of my bedroom on winter afternoons— days when I should be working. I can only feel it if I reach out blindly, and only for a moment before it morphs into a cobweb or a pale yellow lampshade or a pile of dirty laundry, left for weeks. Meanwhile, we buy small packets of tomato seeds and plan to start a garden, sometime next spring. 4. Only half of the storm made it to the harbor. Your mother picked you up by your childhood and spun you into an ornament, sweet and fragile like glass sugar. In the rain, the best of your forgiveness melted away. More specifically, when they found your car, the windshield was drenched in your brother’s cheapest whiskey. They say the air smelled like melting plastic. It tasted like gravel and summertime and all those lemon-lime beach towns you swore you never loved…

John T. Leonard is an award-winning writer, English teacher, and poetry editor for Twyckenham Notes. He holds an M.A. in English from Indiana University. His previous works have appeared in Chiron Review, December Magazine, North Dakota Review, Ethel Zine, Louisiana Literature, Jelly Bucket, Mud Season Review, Nimrod International Journal, The Indianapolis Review, Genre: Urban Arts, and Trailer Park Quarterly among others. He lives in Elkhart, Indiana with his wife, three cats, and two dogs. You can follow him on Twitter at @jotyleon and @TwyckenhamNotes.

Tipton Poetry Journal – Spring 2022

Unintended Consequences at Mack Lake, 1980

S.D. Dillon The controlled burn spirals Out of control, Torches the Jack pine habitat Rebuilt in narrow columns, and fades into charred remains. Things cool down. Birds nest. The return of Kirtland’s warbler From the precipice Brought out haters, with posters: red circle & a slash Through a female black-throated blue warbler.

S.D. Dillon has been published in the Detroit Free Press, FIELD, The South Carolina Review, the Hawai’i Pacific Review, The RavensPerch, and Lighthouse Weekly, and his poetry is forthcoming in Walloon Writers Review, Tar River Poetry, and Tampa Review. He has an AB from Princeton and an MFA from Notre Dame, where he was Managing Editor of The Bend in 2004. He subsequently worked for three years in the editorial departments of a boutique literary agency and Carroll & Graf Publishers, where he acquired and edited a handful of titles. He lives in Grosse Pointe, Michigan.

Crow envies the bees Peter Grandbois Whose thoughts never betray them when their children fall to that temple constructed of web And the woodpeckers, who are too busy to choose the wrong things to love

Tipton Poetry Journal – Spring 2022 The starlings, too, he envies for the intuition that tells them when one body ends and another begins Meanwhile, he sits atop the telephone line, beside which this path goes, staring out over a dump All this seeing is a trick All this seeming a joke It’s never about the thing that shines “Remember, nothing is permanent,” the squirrel says from its upside-down perch below him He hates squirrels “If there weren’t so many . . . If I wasn’t . . .” He stops short, resenting his own whining sickness The squirrel skitters away Dark settles around him, and a quiet under the high wheat In the distance, horses wade toward the moon listening to the sound of a lone crow damning each and every god worth naming

Peter Grandbois is the author of thirteen books, the most recent of which is the Snyder prize-winning, Last Night I Aged a Hundred Years (Ashland Poetry Press 2021). His poems, stories, and essays have appeared in over one hundred and fifty journals. His plays have been nominated for several New York Innovative Theatre Awards and have been performed in St. Louis, Columbus, Los Angeles, and New York. He is poetry editor at Boulevard Magazine and teaches at Denison University in Ohio. You can find him at www.petergrandbois.com

Tipton Poetry Journal – Spring 2022

Lili Cameron Morse In Yantai, Lili rode on the back of my bicycle, an arm wrapped around my waist, and I peddled us to the beach on our first date, not knowing she’d fallen asleep as a girl and rolled off the rooftop. Her mom fed the pet dog to the hospital director. Her mother, who could always find a vein, was a master seamstress. My wife mastered raw meat before I could boil water. With her cousin, she liked to torture cockroaches. I knew none of these things when I asked her to marry me: the idyllic childhood fields of rapeseed, half-repressed memories. Cameron Morse is Senior Reviews editor at Harbor Review and the author of eight collections of poetry. His first collection, Fall Risk, won Glass Lyre Press’s 2018 Best Book Award. His latest is The Thing Is (Briar Creek Press, 2021). He holds an MFA from the University of Kansas City-Missouri and lives in Independence, Missouri, with his wife Lili and three children. For more information, check out his Facebook page or website.

Grief or memory Akshaya Pawaskar Can you wash it off with a swim in the sea, salt mixing with salt diluting, like body rinsed of the sins? If you take it to the mountains and leave it in the thin air, bury it under the snow, will it call you back? Like escape artists we run, unlock the trunk swim to the surface, free ourselves from the cage, yet sorrow like love comes unbidden.

Tipton Poetry Journal – Spring 2022 Can we decorate it with jewels of metaphors, in colorful clothes of verse, dilute it in soft music or turn a deaf ear, surround ourselves with noise so loud that we can’t hear its persistent knock. Just when walking down the street having left the baggage in the garbage pail around the corner you feel light, the doorbell rings and who do you see standing at the door, teary eyed, making you feel guilty for having left it behind and moved on. So we trudge along adrift on this wave of loss as we are washed ashore, it pulls us back in. Like a snake it sheds the old skin and starts afresh. We are free falling into this abyss. Numbers have faces now, obituaries are not merely ink on paper One such hangs on the wall, Inside a frame, garlanded. He weighs heavy on his empty chair. He is everywhere yet he is nowhere. He forgot his suitcase, his pocketbook, his cellphone, his homestead. He forgot us. but he lives on, until our grief dies, then he is a memory. Akshaya Pawaskar is a doctor practicing in India and poetry is her passion. Her poems have been published in Tipton Poetry Journal, Shards, The Blue Nib, North of Oxford, Indian Rumination, Rock and Sling among many others. She won the Craven Arts Council ekphrastic poetry competition in 2020 and was placed second in The Blue Nib chapbook contest in 2018. Her first solo poetry chapbook,The falling in and the falling out, was published by Alien Buddha Press in January 2021.

Tipton Poetry Journal – Spring 2022

Grandfather clock at the Brontë Parsonage

Pama Lee Bennett Each evening at nine, your father said goodnight and walked up the stairs, pausing to wind the grandfather clock on the landing, the clock which chimed your hours, ticking away the precious minutes of your soon-passing lives. A girl in a red dress is painted above the numerals. Did she hear your childish shouts and see your imaginative sword fights? Did she watch each of you pass by, again and again, almost blinded by the flash of your genius, so that she had to turn aside slightly? Did she watch you leave and return, did she see the flow and final ebbs of your lives? And the clock ticked loudly in your silence, Charlotte, in that terrible year when the others had died, the ticking, ticking almost driving you mad each night after your father had wound the clock and gone up to bed, and still the clock is ticking, and the girl watches us also come and go from the rooms of your house. We pause on the stairs to look at her face and the gold clock hands and the black numerals, and the small wooden door one opens to wind the clock, this clock which is ticking our minutes too, the minutes held in the eyes of the girl in the red dress.

Pama Lee Bennett is a retired speech pathologist living in Sioux City, Iowa, who received a BA in English and an MA in speech pathology from the University of Iowa. She plays in a Renaissance recorder ensemble, and volunteers as an English teacher in Poland. She has previously been published in Bogg, Evening Street Review, and Dash.

Tipton Poetry Journal – Spring 2022

Shaker Meeting Nettie Farris Brothers and Sisters turn, turn, turn— oak planks beneath them. [This poem first appeared on the LexPoMo Writing Challenge blog in June 2021.]

Shaker Supper Nettie Farris peas, potatoes (new), soup, chicken, Shaker Lemon Pie [This poem first appeared on the LexPoMo Writing Challenge blog in June 2021.] Nettie Farris is the author of four chapbooks of poetry: The Alice Poems (dancing girl press, 2022), The Wendy Bird Poems (dancing girl press, 2022), Fat Crayons (Finishing Line Press, 2015) and Communion (Accents Publishing, 2013). Her reviews have appeared in Blue Lyra Review and North American Review. Her flash lyric essays have appeared in Miracle Monocole. She lives in Floyds Knobs, Indiana.

Sybarites of the Darkened Sky Carol Hamilton The Pleiades sing songs at night. These Sisters ring in star-stuff bright. They dance across sun path’s swift flight And shed their slippers as day shouts light. Carol Hamilton has retired from teaching 2nd grade through graduate school in Connecticut, Indiana and Oklahoma, from storytelling and volunteer medical translating. She is a former Poet Laureate of Oklahoma and has published 19 books and chapbooks:children's novels, legends and poetry. She has been nominated ten times for a Pushcart Prize. She has won a Southwest Book Award, Oklahoma Book Award, David Ray Poetry Prize, Byline Magazine literary awards in both short story and poetry, Warren Keith Poetry Award, Pegasus Award and a Chiron Review Chapbook Award.

Tipton Poetry Journal – Spring 2022

Reading Me T. Dallas Saylor Not just my tells but my takes: I lie beneath a shedding tree but you gather the truth in dying brown & yellow fragments; I let blood, let blood run from knuckles because I won’t run but you step in front of my body, eclipse me. When I’ve run my words dry, you read my lines of sight from impulse to climax, ice torched to mist & seed slung to bursting earth & mouth & pulse to pulse & climax. Order for me at lunch. Take my queen.

T. Dallas Saylor is a PhD candidate at Florida State University and holds an MFA from the University of Houston. His work meditates on the body, especially gender and sexuality, against physical, spiritual, and digital landscapes. He lives in Houston, Texas. He is on Twitter: @dallas_saylor.

Night Without Similes Elaine Fowler Palencia Son, I don’t know how to tell you what is happening. Similes are worthless. Your damaged brain cannot grasp the concept of unlike resembling like.

Tipton Poetry Journal – Spring 2022 To you, words mean only what they say and in your material world nothing is like anything but itself. Perhaps that’s the cleanest way to live. Tonight, when again your bowels let loose and your muscles go rigid and you cannot even lift your head from where you’ve fallen, I clean you up, give you pills that may or may not help, arrange blankets over your stiffly arched feet, bed down beside you on the floor to watch your nails dig into your palms, hear each breath become a sigh that I fear may be your last. No use in summoning help. The doctors are out of ideas. Your eyes signal you are afraid, so I think of what you love and say, “Outside, there are witches in the trees. They are inviting the deer and rabbits for a Halloween party. There’ll be witch’s pizza with sausage, and they’ll invite Superman and Batman, and Harry Potter will fly in on his Nimbus 2000.” Now that you have something happy to imagine your eyes shine and your quivering lips smile. At two a.m., as the rain arrives, your breathing smooths. At seven, you smack your lips to ask for witches’ pizza and hold up your arms to show me they no longer shake. I like to think it was story that pulled you through as it did me, my fractured dreams full of magic black cats stropping themselves against your wasted legs, refusing to let you go into that other world, for which we have only similes. Elaine Fowler Palencia lives in Illinois and has published four poetry chapbooks, most recently, How to Prepare Escargots (Main Street Rag Press, 2020). Her poetry and fiction have received seven Pushcart Prize nominations, one from Tipton Poetry Journal. She is also the author of two short story collections and a nonfiction, historical work about her great-great grandfather, On Rising Ground: The Life and Civil War Letters of John M. Douthit, 52nd Georgia Volunteer Infantry Regiment (Mercer U. Press, 2021).

Tipton Poetry Journal – Spring 2022

Bonnie George Fish Raitt fiery red-haired inferno that knockout voice she doesn’t just sing the blues, she is the blues! a powerful gushing waterfall from an extremely high precipice and that slide guitar—some of the finest now heard she is sultry and soulful, compassionate but nasty—all at once! and when she wails Wilson Pickett’s “Three-Time Loser,” you know she knows and feels what it’s like to be a three-time loser even when she is certainly no three-time loser herself! Perhaps the best last words on Ms. Raitt were said by Bruce Springsteen, The Boss himself— “It takes a red-headed woman/To get the dirty work done.” Rock on, Bonnie, rock on! [Note: Ms. Raitt deservedly received a Lifetime Achievement award at the 2022 Grammys.] George Fish is a self-described Punk Rock Poet and extensively published prose writer who lives in Indianapolis. His poetry has been previously published in Tipton Poetry Journal, Flying Island, the literary anthology And Then, the socialist website New Politics, Poems 4 Palestine, and elsewhere. He may be reached at georgefish666@yahoo.com.

A Passing glance Nolo Segundo The other day as I turned the corner onto my quiet street I saw a woman so perfect, she snatched my breath away as she waited to cross the road.

Tipton Poetry Journal – Spring 2022 It was like seeing a movie star or a beauty queen close up-my heart ached a bit, I confess, when I thought, once, a long time ago, I might have had a chance…. But now I’m just an old man driving an old car to an old house. I drove slowly and could see her gracefully crossing the street in my rear-view mirror, much like a dream fading quickly away … suddenly, from somewhere far beyond my mind, I realized the truth of what I saw: that it was all just stupid illusion-she was young and beautiful, I, old and lame, but those were just markers on the wheel of time. The wheel would turn, my body would die, hers would age, no longer enrapturing men—in truth she was already an old woman which I could not see, nor could I see the sweet child still playing within her. When there are no more days left, our souls will be free of the wheel, and all the world’s illusions will seem as distant, fading dreams.

Nolo Segundo became a published poet in his 70's in over 80 literary journals in the U.S., U.K., Canada, Romania, India, and in 2 trade book collections: The Enormity of Existence [2020] and Of Ether and Earth [2021]. Both titles reflect the awareness he's had for over 50 years since having an NDE whilst almost drowning in a Vermont river: that he has--is--a consciousness that predates birth and survives death, what poets once called a soul. Nominated for the Pushcart Prize 2022, he's a retired teacher [America, Japan, Taiwan, Cambodia] who's been married 42 years to a smart and beautiful Taiwanese woman.

Tipton Poetry Journal – Spring 2022

Review: Tornado Drill by Dave Malone

Reviewed by Barry Harris

Title: Tornado Drill Author: Dave Malone Year: 2022 Publisher: Kelsay Books

From my first read of the title poem, Dave Malone’s poetry reveals itself in its crafted word choice and artful metaphor. Before the tornado, the school children in “Tornado Drill” are not simply hiding beneath their desks. Their “…legs angle / and lean like autumn crickets.” Time slows within the poem illustrated by dust motes which float, not just around their shoes, but “above the tongues of our sneakers.” When the storm hits, “… the sky paints / the classroom windows cocoa.” Not muddy brown, but cocoa. While I have, over time, read and published three of the poems in this volume, this was my first time reading a collection of Malone’s work in one sitting. By the time I reached the end of the opening title poem, I was enchanted by his deft use of metaphor when his final couplet is a refer back to the opening image of the angular legs of schoolchildren cramped under their desks “like autumn crickets:” Some of us srape wings together and squeak Others weep. I scramble to the glass.

A reader discovers in Malone’s poetry his ability to meld two stories into one, or perhaps reveal that they are both one. In “Leaf Blower,” the poet’s morning neditation is interrupted by a leaf-blowing neighbor. Like mathematics, … She’s precise the way she slides from side to side, the way she forms right angles as if acing high school math.

Tipton Poetry Journal – Spring 2022 The leaf-blowing neighbor’s noise increasingly sounds “louder than semitrucks howling from the bypass” and we witness how … She blows into blowing into blowing until a vortex of leaves half-eaten by mower and storm form in the narrows

By this time we have forgotten the interruption of the poet’s morning meditation until the last lines: Here is a full sound. Here is The aum I must have been waiting for.

Many of Dave Malone’s poems exhibit a mix of empathy and curiosity, as if answering the question what is underneath all this? In “The 9:15 to Memphis,” he paints a picture of a neighbor gardener, introduced to us interestingly as the “gray man on the corner.” We are told that he “gardened most of the year round.” He twice dug up potatoes in “December ice” with “his big hands” and liked bruised tomatoes. Then we are told that “he grew a pair of teenage girls for a while.” Girls whose Hips hypnotized water sprinklers in the summer after they batted wiffle balls into the street. Their home runs were the few times they left his lot. Once, I saw the girls at the hardware store with a wad of bills buying tomato cages, their eyes fixed on the bus schedule above the clerk.

Tipton Poetry Journal – Spring 2022 Like many poets these days, Malone crafted several pandemic-era poems into his collection. His poem “Chance It” exemplifies this episode in our shared history expertly. When my quarantine is over, I want to bet at the horse races. I want to be that guy at the track, down on his luck, glad of the rain … with so much happening in the rain, with the trotting horses and the cooing jockeys, with distant clouds crumbling pale and thin like wafers, like my heart for a girl I knew in school, like communion.

I once attended a lecture on how to compile a poetry book manuscript. The lecturer’s point, whether true or not, was memorable to me. He described a book of poetry like a train. At the front of the train is the locomotive. Here is the heavy duty engine. Here is where you place your most powerful poem — one that can pull the rest. At the end of the book is the caboose. (The lecturer was old enough to remember cabooses). This is where the conductor rides, waving farewell to you as the train slides away. This is where you place the poem that winks at you as it leaves, like both of you might know a little secret. The opening poem in Tornado Drill is the title poem discussed earlier. Here, is the complete text of “Heron” from the final page 96. I startled the great blue heron when my kayak scratched stones in the river’s low summer water. With little effort, like the way one takes off shoes, the grand bird flapped long arms, held steady, until she found the shore opposite me and slipped into the sycamores below the bluff. She stayed there a long time, longer than my life.

Tipton Poetry Journal – Spring 2022 Dave Malone grew up in both Missouri and Kansas. 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.

Barry Harris is editor of the Tipton Poetry Journal and four anthologies by Brick Street Poetry. He has published one poetry collection, Something At The Center. Married and father of two grown sons, Barry lives in Brownsburg, Indiana and is retired from Eli Lilly and Company. His poetry has appeared in Kentucky Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Grey Sparrow, Silk Road Review, Saint Ann‘s Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Boston Literary Magazine, Night Train, Silver Birch Press, Flying Island, Awaken Consciousness, Writers‘ Bloc, RedHeaded Stepchild and Laureate: The Literary Journal of Arts for Lawrence. He graduated a long time ago with a major in English from Ball State University.

Tipton Poetry Journal – Spring 2022

Editor Barry Harris is editor of the Tipton Poetry Journal and four 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, and Reflections on Little Eagle Creek. He has published one poetry collection, Something At The Center. Married and father of two grown sons, Barry lives in Brownsburg, Indiana and is retired from Eli Lilly and Company. His poetry has appeared in Kentucky Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Grey Sparrow, Silk Road Review, Saint Ann‘s Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Boston Literary Magazine, Night Train, Silver Birch Press, Flying Island, Awaken Consciousness, Writers‘ Bloc, Red-Headed Stepchild and Laureate: The Literary Journal of Arts for Lawrence. 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.

Tipton Poetry Journal – Spring 2022

Contributor Biographies Duane Anderson currently lives in La Vista, Nebraska, and volunteers with a non-profit organization as a Donor Ambassador on their blood drives. He has had poems published in The Pangolin Review, Fine Lines, The Sea Letter, Cholla Needles, Tipton Poetry Journal, Adelaide Literary Magazine and several other publications. Pama Lee Bennett is a retired speech pathologist living in Sioux City, Iowa, who received a BA in English and an MA in speech pathology from the University of Iowa. She plays in a Renaissance recorder ensemble, and volunteers as an English teacher in Poland. She has previously been published in Bogg, Evening Street Review, and Dash. L. Annette Binder was born in Germany and immigrated to the US as a child. Poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Stone, Town Creek Poetry, and JMWW. She lives in New Hampshire with her family. Poems by Jonathan Bracker have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry Northwest, Southern Poetry Review, and other periodicals, and in eight collections, the latest of which, from Seven Kitchens Press, is Attending Junior High. He lives in San Francisco. Rose Bromberg is the author of two poetry chapbooks whose themes span the world of nature and the field of medicine: The Language of Seasons (Finishing Line Press, 2018) and Poemedica (Finishing Line Press, 2011), which was a finalist in FLP’s Poetry Chapbook Competition. Rose is a Pushcart Prize nominee and her work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies such as RUNE (The MIT Journal of Arts and Letters), Medscape J Med., Bridges, Southern Indiana Review, Tipton Poetry Journal, rock & sling and elsewhere. She lives in Florida. S.D. Dillon has been published in the Detroit Free Press, FIELD, The South Carolina Review, the Hawai’i Pacific Review, and The RavensPerch, and is forthcoming in Walloon Writers Review. I have an AB from Princeton and an MFA from Notre Dame, where he was Managing Editor of The Bend in 2004. I subsequently worked for three years in the editorial departments of a boutique literary agency and Carroll & Graf Publishers, where he acquired and edited a handful of titles. He lives in Grosse Pointe, Michigan. Will Dolben lives in Santa Barbara, California and holds a master's degree in writing from the University of Southern California's MPW program, now known as the MFA in Writing and Publishing at Vermont College of Fine Arts. He was a quarterfinalist in the prestigious Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences international screenwriting competition. His poetry has appeared in journals including Pioneertown, High Shelf and Triggerfish Critical Review. Michael Estabrook has been publishing his poetry in the small press since the 1980s. He has published over 20 collections, a recent one being The Poet’s Curse, A Miscellany (The Poetry Box, 2019). He lives in Acton, Massachusetts. Aubrey Farelli is a student at Erie Community College who lives in Depew, New York. She is a new and emerging writer.

Tipton Poetry Journal – Spring 2022 Nettie Farris is the author of four chapbooks of poetry: The Alice Poems (dancing girl press, 2022), The Wendy Bird Poems (dancing girl press, 2022), Fat Crayons (Finishing Line Press, 2015) and Communion (Accents Publishing, 2013). Her reviews have appeared in Blue Lyra Review and North American Review. Her flash lyric essays have appeared in Miracle Monocole. She lives in Floyds Knobs, Indiana. Oleg Feoktistov is a teacher at a local high school in Odesa, Ukraine. Oleg teaches English language and literature. His class is a special place where thirty kids learn, play, and get ready for life. George Fish is a self-described Punk Rock Poet and extensively published prose writer who lives in Indianapolis. His poetry has been previously published in Tipton Poetry Journal, Flying Island, the literary anthology And Then, the socialist website New Politics, Poems 4 Palestine, and elsewhere. He may be reached at georgefish666@yahoo.com. Joe Gianotti has taught English at Lowell High School in Northwest Indiana for twentyfive years. He is from Whiting, a small, blue collar, industrial town just outside Chicago. He studied English, history, and education at the University of Indianapolis and Purdue University. His poetry has been published or is forthcoming in This, Literary Magazine, The Chaffey Review, Steam Ticket, The Tipton Poetry Journal, and other places, as well as collected in the second volume of This is Poetry: The Midwest Poets. Marjie Giffin is a Midwestern writer who has authored four regional histories and whose poetry has appeared in Snapdragon, Poetry Quarterly, Flying Island, The Kurt Vonnegut Literary Journal, Saint Katherine Review, Northwest Indiana Literary Journal, Blue Heron Review, Tipton Poetry Journal, Agape Review and the anthologies The Lives We Have Live(d) and What Was and What Will Be, Leave them Something, and Reflections on Little Eagle Creek. Her work was recently featured online by the Heartland Society of Women Writers and her first chapbook, Touring, was published in 2021. She lives in Indianapolis and is active in the Indiana Writers’ Center and has taught both college writing and gifted education. Peter Grandbois is the author of thirteen books, the most recent of which is the Snyder prize-winning, Last Night I Aged a Hundred Years (Ashland Poetry Press 2021). His poems, stories, and essays have appeared in over one hundred and fifty journals. His plays have been nominated for several New York Innovative Theatre Awards and have been performed in St. Louis, Columbus, Los Angeles, and New York. He is poetry editor at Boulevard Magazine and teaches at Denison University in Ohio. You can find him at www.petergrandbois.com John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident now living in Rhode Island, recently published in Sheepshead Review, Stand, Poetry Salzburg Review and Hollins Critic. Latest books, Leaves On Pages Memory Outside The Head and Guest Of Myself are available through Amazon. Work upcoming in Ellipsis, Blueline International Poetry Review. Carol Hamilton has retired from teaching 2nd grade through graduate school in Connecticut, Indiana and Oklahoma, from storytelling and volunteer medical translating. She is a former Poet Laureate of Oklahoma and has published 19 books and chapbooks:children's novels, legends and poetry. She has been nominated ten times for a Pushcart Prize. She has won a Southwest Book Award, Oklahoma Book Award, David Ray Poetry Prize, Byline Magazine literary awards in both short story and poetry, Warren Keith Poetry Award, Pegasus Award and a Chiron Review Chapbook Award.

Tipton Poetry Journal – Spring 2022 Stephanie L. Harper lives and writes in Indianapolis, where she earned her MFA from Butler University. Harper’s poem “Cassowary” was selected by Mark Doty as a finalist in the 2021 Red Wheelbarrow Poetry Prize. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in the Red Wheelbarrow Literary Magazine, Neologism Poetry, Tipton Poetry Journal, Narrative Northeast, Vox Populi, The Night Heron Barks, Foothill Journal, and elsewhere. Juliet Hinton graduated from William Carey University with a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration in 1999 and MBA in 2000. Certified Tumor Registrar managerial and strategic planning service at Forrest General Hospital in Hattiesburg, Mississippi for over twenty years. She partners with the American Cancer Society to offer events and grants to fulfill the needs of the Pine Belt community and collaborates with the FGH Foundation on projects to improve care, and with other groups to improve the cancer patient’s journey at FGH and in the community. She received a Pushcart Nomination for her poem “Calvary Baptist Church”. She is currently working on more Perry County and landscape poems, and a new project on oncology cancer care, and research and informatics. C.L. Hoang was born and raised in Vietnam during the war and came to America in the 1970's. He graduated from Ohio University and the University of California, Berkeley and earns his living in San Diego as an engineer, but dabbles in the pleasure of writing every chance he gets. Diane Kendig’s latest book is Woman with a Fan. Her writing has appeared in J Journal, Wordgathering, Valparaiso Review, and other journals. She ran a prison writing workshop in Ohio for 18 years, and now curates the Cuyahoga County (Ohio) Public Library weblog, Read + Write. Her website is dianekendig.com . Norbert Krapf, former Indiana Poet Laureate, will have his fifteenth poetry collection, Spirit Sister Dance, and his Homecomings: A Writer's Memoir, published this year. He received the Lucille Medwick Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, received a Creative Renewal Fellowship from the Indy Arts Council to combine poetry and the blues, and has a poem in stained-glass at the Indy International Airport. For more, see http://www.krapfpoetry.net/. Mary Hills Kuck has retired from teaching English and German in the US and Jamaica and now lives in Massachusetts with her family. She has received a Pushcart Prize nomination and has published in a number of journals, including the Connecticut River Review, SLANT, Tipton Poetry Journal, Burningword Literary Journal, From the Depths, Splash, Poetry Quarterly, Main Street Rag, and others. Her chapbook, Intermittent Sacraments, was published in June, 2021, by Finishing Line Press. John T. Leonard is an award-winning writer, English teacher, and poetry editor for Twyckenham Notes. He holds an M.A. in English from Indiana University. His previous works have appeared in Chiron Review, December Magazine, North Dakota Review, Ethel Zine, Louisiana Literature, Jelly Bucket, Mud Season Review, Nimrod International Journal, The Indianapolis Review, Genre: Urban Arts, and Trailer Park Quarterly among others. He lives in Elkhart, Indiana with his wife, three cats, and two dogs. You can follow him on Twitter at @jotyleon and @TwyckenhamNotes.

Tipton Poetry Journal – Spring 2022 Martha McCollough is a writer living in Amherst, Massachusetts. She has an MFA in painting from Pratt Institute. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Bear Review, Tammy, Pangyrus, Barrelhouse, Crab Creek Review, and Salamander, among others. Her chapbook, Grandmother Mountain was published by Blue Lyra Press. Martha's poetry collection, Wolf Hat Iron Shoes, is available from Lily Poetry Review Books. Cameron Morse is Senior Reviews editor at Harbor Review and the author of eight collections of poetry. His first collection, Fall Risk, won Glass Lyre Press’s 2018 Best Book Award. His latest is The Thing Is (Briar Creek Press, 2021). He holds an MFA from the University of Kansas City-Missouri and lives in Independence, Missouri, with his wife Lili and three children. For more information, check out his Facebook page or website. Elaine Fowler Palencia lives in Illinois and has published four poetry chapbooks, most recently, How to Prepare Escargots (Main Street Rag Press, 2020). Her poetry and fiction have received seven Pushcart Prize nominations, one from Tipton Poetry Journal. She is also the author of two short story collections and a nonfiction, historical work about her great-great grandfather, On Rising Ground: The Life and Civil War Letters of John M. Douthit, 52nd Georgia Volunteer Infantry Regiment (Mercer U. Press, 2021). Amy Suzanne Parker is a PhD candidate at Binghamton University in New York, where she studies English and Creative Writing. Her work has appeared in Juked, Hobart, DIAGRAM, Pithead Chapel, Burrow Press Review. Originally from the Tampa Bay Area, she loves a good storm. Born in the Caribbean and raised in the U.S., Tia Paul-Louis began writing songs at age 11, then experimented with poetry during high school. She earned a BA in English/Creative Writing from the University of South Florida along with a M.F.A in Creative Writing from National University in California. Her works have appeared in literary magazines such as The Voices Project, Ethos Literary Journal, and Rabbit Catastrophe Review. Some of her favorite authors and poets include Langston Hughes, Emily Dickinson, Maya Angelou and Edgar Allan Poe. Apart from writing, Paul-Louis enjoys music, photography, acting and cooking, though she mostly finds herself and others through poetry. Akshaya Pawaskar is a doctor practicing in India and poetry is her passion. Her poems have been published in Tipton Poetry Journal, Shards, The Blue Nib, North of Oxford, Indian Rumination, Rock and Slingamong many others. She won the Craven Arts Council ekphrastic poetry competition in 2020 and was placed second in The Blue Nib chapbook contest in 2018. Her first solo poetry chapbook,The falling in and the falling out, was published by Alien Buddha Press in January 2021. Nancy Kay Peterson’s poetry has appeared in print and online in numerous publications, most recently in Dash Literary Journal, HerWords, Last Stanza Poetry Journal, One Sentence Poems, Spank the Carp, Steam Ticket, Tipton Poetry Journal and Three Line Poetry. From 2004-2009, she co-edited and co-published Main Channel Voices: A Dam Fine Literary Magazine (Winona, Minnesota). Finishing Line Press published her two poetry chapbooks, Belated Remembrance (2010) and Selling the Family (2021). For more information, see www.nancykaypeterson.com

Tipton Poetry Journal – Spring 2022 Thomas Piekarski is a former editor of the California State Poetry Quarterly. His poetry has appeared in such publications as Poetry Quarterly, Literature Today, Poetry Salzburg, South African Literary Journal, Modern Literature, and others. His books of poetry are Ballad of Billy the Kid, Monterey Bay Adventures, Mercurial World, and Aurora California. Recent work by Bruce Robinson appears or is forthcoming in Tar River Poetry, Spoon River, Rattle, Oddball, New World Writing, Parliament, and the Loud Coffee Press Flower-Shaped Bullet anthology. He lives in Brooklyn, New York. Henry, unfortunately, died toward the end of April, after a short illness. Mykyta Ryzhykh lives in Ukraine and is the winner of the international competition “Art Against Drugs,” bronze medalist of the festival Chestnut House, laureate of the literary competition named after Tutyunnik. Mykyta has been published in the journals Dzvin, Ring A, Polutona, Rechport, Topos, Articulation, Formaslov, Colon, Literature Factory, and Literary Chernihiv. Terry Savoie lives in Iowa. Beyond a previous appearance in Tipton Poetry Journal, more than four hundred poems have been published in journals both here and abroad. These include APR, Ploughshares, America, Prairie Schooner, The Minnesota Review, The Montana Review, North American Review, Sonora Review and The Iowa Review. T. Dallas Saylor is a PhD candidate at Florida State University and holds an MFA from the University of Houston. His work meditates on the body, especially gender and sexuality, against physical, spiritual, and digital landscapes. He lives in Houston, Texas. He is on Twitter: @dallas_saylor. Nolo Segundo became a published poet in his 70's in over 80 literary journals in the U.S., U.K., Canada, Romania, India, and in 2 trade book collections: The Enormity of Existence [2020] and Of Ether and Earth [2021]. Both titles reflect the awareness he's had for over 50 years since having an NDE whilst almost drowning in a Vermont river: that he has--is--a consciousness that predates birth and survives death, what poets once called a soul. Nominated for the Pushcart Prize 2022, he's a retired teacher [America, Japan, Taiwan, Cambodia] who's been married 42 years to a smart and beautiful Taiwanese woman. Ellen Skilton was born in Tipton, Iowa, went to college in Indiana and now lives in Philadelphia. Betty Stanton is a writer who lives and works in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in various journals and collections and has been included in anthologies from Dos Gatos Press and Picaroon Poetry Press. She received her MFA from The University of Texas at El Paso. Michael E. Strosahl is a midwestern river-born poet, originally from Moline, Illinois, now living in Jefferson City, Missouri. Besides several appearances in the Tipton Poetry Journal, Maik’s work has appeared in Flying Island, Bards Against Hunger projects, on buses, in museums and online at indianavoicejournal, poetrysuperhighway and projectagentorange. Maik also has a weekly poetry column at the online blog Moristotle & Company.

Tipton Poetry Journal – Spring 2022 Jeffrey S. Thompson was raised in Fargo, North Dakota, and educated at the University of Iowa and Cornell Law School. He lives and works in Phoenix, Arizona. At Iowa he participated in undergraduate poetry workshops and had a couple poems published in small journals. He pursued a career in public interest law, but recently decided to start sharing his work again. Thompson was named a finalist for the 2021 Iowa Review Poetry Award, and has been published or accepted at Neologism Poetry Journal, North Dakota Quarterly, The Main Street Rag, and Passengers Journal. Gene Twaronite is the author of four collections of poetry as well as the rhyming picture book How to Eat Breakfast. His first poetry book Trash Picker on Mars, published by Kelsay Books, was the winner of the 2017 New Mexico-Arizona Book Award for Arizona poetry. His newest poetry collection Shopping Cart Dreams will be published by Kelsay Books in 2022. Gene’s poems have been described as: “ranging from edgy to whimsical to inscrutable … playfully haunting and hauntingly playful.” A former New Englander, Gene now lives in Tucson. Follow more of his poetry at genetwaronite.poet.com or https://www.instagram.com/genetwaronitepoetry/. Hardarshan Singh Valia is an earth scientist by profession living in Highland, Indiana. His poems have appeared in Wards Literary Journal, Northwest Indiana Literary Journal, Poetic Medicine, Who Writes Short Shorts, Dove Tales – Writing for Peace- an anthology, Pages Penned in Pandemic – A Collective, Caesura, Sage-ing, Literary Veganism, Right Hand Pointing, COVID tales journal, Poetry and Covid, and Nightingale & Sparrow. David Vancil is retired from the faculty of Indiana State University. His work has appeared in small periodicals, critical reviews, and a few anthologies. As well, he is the author of four poetry collections. War and Its Discontents, a collection of military poems centered on family service and his own time in the U.S. Army, will be published by Angelina River Press sometime in 2022. He is at work on a collection of new and selected poems, which he hopes to publish no later than 2023. David lives in Terre Haute, Indiana, with his wife, three cats, and a dog.

Tipton Poetry Journal #52 - Spring 2022

Articles inside

Martha McCollough

Elaine Fowler Palencia

Michael E. Strosahl

Contributor Biographies

Pama Lee Bennett

Review: Tornado Drill by Dave Malone

S.D. Dillon

Thomas Piekarski

Rose Bromberg

David Vancil

Jonathan Bracker

Bruce Robinson

Diane Kendig

Aubrey Farelli

John Grey

Amy Suzanne Parker

Jeffrey S. Thompson

Joe Gianotti

Juliet Hinton

Michael Estabrook

L. Annette Binder

Ellen Skilton

Mary Hills Kuck

Tia Paul-Louis

Oleg Feoktistov

Norbert Krapf

Marjie Giffin

C.L. Hoang

Will Dolben

Terry Savoie

Mykyta Ryzhykh