Tipton Poetry Journal #55 - Winter 2023

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 39 poets from the United States (21 different states), and 5 poets from India, Ireland, Mexico, Ukraine, and the United Kingdom.

Our Featured Poem this issue is “Kintsugi,” written by Patricia Joslin. Patricia’s poem, which also receives an award of $25, can be found on page 7. 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 Reckless Pilgrims by Allison Thorpe.

Cover Photo: Snow Children by Robert M. O’Brien. Statue in photo is in Circle Park along the White River iin Meeker, Colorado.

Barry Harris, Editor

Copyright 2023 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.

Omaha in Winter KatherineHoerth

It’s hard to be in love in Omaha in winter when the downtown streets encase in ice each morning as the city struggles to get up, and snowplows move the mountains of last night’s storm. They gouge and scrape the pavement, sullying the snow to match the sky, the psyche. Trees cast bony shadows west, to the openness, the whitening

oblivion. The sun, exhausted now, takes her time to rise before she starts her crawl across the sky just to lie down in the cozy bed of the horizon.

Most fly off and leave Nebraska when she’s in this winter mood, return in spring when she dresses in forsythia. But you remain to weather out the cold.

You hold what warmth is left against your chest as frost begins to nibble on your earlobe and the barren scent of winter’s breath settles on your hair, your skin, your heart.

Katherine Hoerth is the author of five poetry collections, including the forthcoming Flare Stacks in Full Bloom (Texas Review Press, 2021). She is an assistant professor at Lamar University and editor of Lamar University Literary Press. Her writing interests include eco-poetry, feminism, and formalism. She is a member of the Texas Institute of Letters and lives near Houston.

Atheist

ClaireScott

At seven I stopped believing in Santa after Mary Lou whispered to me betrayed by adults lured into an unreal world I stopped believing in the tooth fairy with her late night dimes, the Easter Bunny with jelly beans and pastel eggs and God

But I am not a good atheist I slip into the back of Saint Anthony’s some Wednesdays at noon and sit in silence with the stained glass saints

I read Simone Weil, longing for her unwavering faith if we ask our Father for bread he does not give us a stone

I find my hands in prayer for hungry children, for their exhausted mothers holding signs on street corners

I see yellow crocus burst through spring snow

I watch my grandson take his first steps grinning with delight and I know God is still in this world even though I don’t believe

Occulting Light

ClaireScott

A light in which the total duration of light in each period is longer than the total duration of darkness. ~ Wikipedia

Lord, let me start again. I don’t want to offend you, but I do wonder why there is so much news breaking bad. Bones, whose? in the desert. Stilts of lightning stalking, fires scorching our land. Can you hear the earth’s great groan, a Black man who can’t breathe, a child with bruises on his back, a woman working two jobs, swallowing fistfuls of Focalin. The lone cry of a wolf.

How can we ride out this strident winter? Why is there no occulting light as we dissolve Percoset in gin and text panicked emojis. What of people with lost faces, breathing burdened air, bodies piling up, can you see them? Over a million. Can you see them? Or do you turn away pretending you prefer tossing haloes like Frisbees down your heavenly halls. Do gods fear the future?

Lord, let me start again. This time on calloused knees, plucking prayers from the air, reciting desperate pleas. When will you whisper promises of better times? I slump over and try to live with curdled dreams, the future impossible to conjugate. Remember you are also the Lord of Light. There must be words of comfort in your Sacred Book.

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

A Lake of Starlight TedKooser

It’s not just a light from above, like a weaker moonlight, but more like a lake in which each tree, each person out walking alone is suspended, all of us floating in place like specks of dust, though somehow passing through, which is, of course, the manner in which our planet is held up to the stars by the stars. It’s not a wonder

we sometimes feel buoyant, wading out into this light.

[This poem first appeared in Cotton Candy: Poems Dipped Out of the Air]

Ted Kooser is Presidential Professor Emeritus at The University of Nebraska, where he taught the writing of poetry. He worked for many years as a life insurance executive; now retired and teaching half time at the University of Nebraska, Ted lives in Garland, Nebraska. His most recent book is Cotton Candy: Poems Dipped Out of the Air (University of Nebraska Press, 2022).

Dear Nobody

GilbertAllen

It’s kind of liberating to realize nobody cares what you do—unless you kneel during The Star Spangled Banner, or kill yourself in spectacular fashion backflipping over the Edmund Pettus Bridge maybe, or saving yourself for the end of a high capacity magazine.

But if you’re not inclined to such melodrama, then you can do pretty much anything and even if you're caught your fellow nobodies will say What the hell, he’s only human I’ve seen worse and then return to watching a Titanic cockatoo on television, saying Believe me, swiveling his orange beak.

Gilbert Allen's most recent books are Believing in Two Bodies (a collection of poems) and The Beasts of Belladonna (a collection of linked stories). Since 1977 he has lived in Travelers Rest, South Carolina, with his wife, Barbara.

What I Like About Cardinals

LynetteLamp

They know their own, but only flock in winter. A conclave of bishops chirp in backyard bushes.

Masked and mohawked, they startle the snow in their crimson cloaks, and brighten my evergreens like bows on a wreath.

They stick around and hunker down surviving frigid northern plains, or enough of them do to make more cardinals. Either it works out, or it doesn’t, but they have no plans to fly south to Florida.

No extra canned goods in the pantry. No gold coins in the gun safe. No lawyers on retainer.

Refusing to fly anywhere but home, their feet cling to icy branches. Ruby feathers ruffle in the wind.

Lynette Lamp is a practicing family physician and recent graduate of the Spalding University MFA program. She has had previous poems published in JAMA (Journal of American Medical Association), The Pharos, and Annals of Internal Medicine. Lynette lives in Winona, Minnesota.

Kintsugi PatriciaJoslin

I trudge through campus alone, shattered by loss. Like a Japanese craftsman you soften my edges pour gold to seal my cracks polish, cradle me. You mend me to become beautiful dust me with desire create a shining cup for us to share, fragments fixed by fate. I surrender to your artistry.

NOTE: Kintsugi, “to join with gold” is the 15th-Century Japanese art of repairing broken pottery by mending the areas of breakage with powdered gold to make an even stronger, more beautiful piece of art.

Patricia Joslin is a retired educator, an avid (but not athletic) golfer and an active volunteer in the Charlotte, North Carolina community. She recently completed a chapbook collection, I’ll Buy Flowers Again Tomorrow: Poems of Loss and Healing which will be published by Charlotte Lit Press this spring. Two of her poems have appeared in Kakalak 2021 and 2022.

January Wakens …

KarenO’Leary

a gentle zephyr with temperatures hovering around 30 degrees. Her reverie would be short lived as her newborn twins demand nourishment only she can give. The breeze awakens her senses. Nearing a juniper shrub, a white rabbit darts out startling them both. He turns back eyes connecting with hers, before hopping away. She smiles. Dormant blades of grass peak through less than three inches of snow, a rare event for January in North Dakota. Today, these moments of solitude renew her spirit as she heads back to the demands of life.

Karen O’Leary is a writer and editor from West Fargo, North Dakota. She has published poetry, short stories, and articles in a variety of venues including, Frogpond, Setu, Fine Lines, Atlas Poetica and NeverEnding Story. Karen edited an international online journal called Whispers http://whispersinthewind333.blogspot.com/ for 5 ½ years. She enjoys sharing the gift of words.

It was a very cold winter that year. The lake was frozen quick and thick and no one ever thought there’d be a problem with the ice. You can’t trust anything. You can’t trust anyone. No one ever does what they’re supposed to do. Those warning signs are there for a reason. Children should always pay attention to their parents, and warning signs, and the color of ice.

The train to the office goes by there every day, comes back the same way every night. There are no other routes. One could get off the train at the stop before the lake, walk about a mile out of their way, wending through alleys and side streets and through a junkyard full of rusted scrap metal and catch the next train at the station just past the lake, but it would take an extra hour out of the day, so all you can do is close your eyes as the train rumbles past the flat water, sometimes it’s light blue and full of ducks, sometimes it’s gray and frosted with ice and chunks of dirty snow. Sometimes, it looks as solid as it did on that day you really should have moved to another town, another state, another country altogether. You should have left this place.

It didn’t take long to pull her out of the ice and onto the solid, far bank. Really, she was gone for so little time it shouldn’t have been an issue at all. But then the kid who said he knew first aid backed up, pale and shaken, and another person who said “you must have done it wrong” took over, and so it went, and again and again. What do you tell people who ask where she is, how she’s doing? Why do they still call?

The train rumbles closer and closer to the part of town where you’ll have to see the lake. It’s easier in the summer, because it looks like a different body of water. Now, years later, you can peek over the top of the safe wall your newspaper makes to see if there are ducks on the lake, or geese, perhaps a heron wading in the shallow end, legs long and thin as matchsticks, searching in the depths for fish that flash and flail against the surface like a flurry of tiny white hands.

Holly Day’s writing has recently appeared in Analog SF, The Hong Kong Review, and Appalachian Journal, and her recent book publications include Music Composition for Dummies, The Tooth is the Largest Organ in the Human Body, and Bound in Ice. She lives in Minneapolis and teaches creative writing at The Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis and Hugo House in Seattle.

Taboos

CarolHamilton

Howard said he no longer believes the dietary codes, but he becomes sick if he eats pork. The books, the TV news, the carefully enunciating voices of NPR serve me a banquet of incest, rape, brother killing brother. The white moon walks right down the street before me, pale platters to step on and smash, and the tides have raced out so fast I hear they have gone to France for the winter. The protective bubble I once lived in burst, and you'd think I would spill myself all over the spring grass. But no.

When all the doors are left open, I continue living in my cage, comforted. I look with my forever eyes to see the world safely staked down with those gleaming, soldierly ranks of metal bars..

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.

Barbie Puzzle

JeanineStevens

~100 Piece, ages 5-12, 1991 Mattel Toys.

The scene, a paint-by numbers back drop: loopy blue snowbanks, Kelly-green trees, gondolas in summery colors. Weak smoke rises from the cabin’s red chimney.

Upper left, it’s all Barbie, big hair, stylish togs, scarlet fur over her heart. If she’s at Heavenly Valley, tiny boots may head east to the bunny slope. If she keeps going, there Nevada’s Bunny Ranch.

Barbie is smiling, always smiling. Her skis pink, of course, cotton candy pink.

Jeanine Stevens is the author of No Lunch

Among the Day Stars (Cold River Press, 2022), and chapbooks, Ornate Persona (Clair Songbirds Press, 2022) and Tea in the Nun’s Liibrary, (Eyewear Publishing, UK, 2022). She is winner of the MacGuffin Poet Hunt and The Ekphrasis Prize. She is winner of the MacGuffin Poet Hunt, WOMR Cape Cod Community Radio National Award, and The William Stafford Award. Jeanine has been published in Evansville Review, North Dakota Review, Chiron Review, Poets’ Espresso Review, and others. Jeanine is Professor Emerita at American River College in Sacramento.

Looking at Putin WallySwist

“He is small and pale . . . so cold he is almost reptilian.”

~Madeleine Albright, Former Secretary of State

Looking at you, the ice frozen forever in your heart dislodges as you clench and unclench your fists the block of it beating against your aortic walls, similarly as you must have beaten false confessions out of your captives when you were in the KGB.

Looking at you, I imagine a dissonant balalaika strumming inside your perilous mind, one which never knows a moral imperative but choses instead the path to power by any means, and whose method no matter how patient you may seem can be described as breakneck speed.

Looking at you, I consider what Pasternak would have thought about what you are, how he would have assessed your levels of darkness, and acceded that your active malevolence and simmering hatred are bleaker than any Russian winter, wretched enough to wither any windowpane of Zhivago’s frost flowers.

Looking at you, I see the discomfort you might feel, if you feel at all, at having such inhumanity packed into what appears to be a human body; although even your skin doesn’t seem to be soft as flesh is, but made of cartilage as sharkskin, as if we could peal that away and there would be,

looking at us, another Putin, one smaller than before, each a Matroyshka doll packed within another, but yet one more Putin, the evil spreading countless ways, which proliferates with such maliciousness as with all of the little windup Trumps that we now see muscling in to overtake our world.

Wally Swist’s books include Huang Po and the Dimensions of Love (Southern Illinois University Press, 2012), selected by Yusef Komunyakaa as co-winner in the 2011 Crab Orchard Series Open Poetry Contest, and A Bird Who Seems to Know Me: Poems

Regarding Birds & Nature (Ex Ophidia Press, 2019), the winner of the 2018 Ex Ophidia Press Poetry Prize. His recent poems have appeared in Asymptote, Chicago Quarterly Review, Hunger Mountain: Vermont College of Fine Arts Journal, The Montreal Review, Pensive: A Global Journal of Spirituality and the Arts, Poetry London, Scoundrel Time, and The Seventh

in Massachusetts.

Quarry Poetry Magazine. Wally lives

Only God Should Move Mountains

ElisabethHarrahy

It started with a smell, sweet as black licorice, that seeped into the air, made her dizzy as she filled the cast iron tub for her son the water running brown and blurry

Each day, more hair down the drain, more neighbors without gallbladders without ovaries ripe with eggs because the water was poisoned with slurry injected into the ground

Coal slurry from a mountaintop mining operation that left nothing but the dirt laid bare and an area flat enough for a Walmart

Where there used to be a mountain and acres of trees, rhododendron, wild ginseng, ferns and black cohosh there is nothing, nothing but ugliness

Now she gets her water from volunteers who show up at the church each week, pours it by the bottle into a pot on the stove and bathes her son while he stands, before tucking him into bed

She sits and smokes on the stoop of the house she cannot sell, tries to follow the call of crickets in the dark, but is halted by the rumble of another coal truck passing through

The young man across the street is dying, his kidneys shutting down

She recalls her recent visit to see him, how his mom kept him tucked beneath a flowered sheet on the couch, how he turned to stare out the window as the morphine dripped into his arm

He used to be one of the tough boys beat up her younger brother once now she just feels bad for him laying there like that, all gentle and still

Stripped of his might like the mountain and soon to become valley fill

Elisabeth Harrahy’s work has appeared in Zone 3, Constellations, The Café Review, Tipton Poetry Journal, Passengers Journal, Ghost City Review, I-70 Review and elsewhere, and has been nominated for Best of the Net. She received an Editor’s Choice Award in the Paterson Literary Review’s 2021 Allen Ginsberg Poetry Contest. She is an associate professor of biology at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater.

Cat? Bag? BartEdelman

The cat’s out of the bag. The bag’s out of the cat. What difference does it make? And if you knew, for certain, Who would truly be the wiser? All hell’s broken loose, again, Yet no one has any idea what to do. I imagine we’ll shrug our shoulders Discuss the usual business As if nothing has taken place. It’s merely how it is here. Small towns tend to be like this; At least, where we call home.

But, then, I’m deathly afraid, There’s the matter of the cat Not to mention the inglorious bag, And who gave birth to whom. Kind of like the chicken/egg thing, If you sit down, stretch a bit, And think long and hard about it A pleasant way to spend the afternoon. Still, a dilemma is a dilemma, Regardless of the initial offering. What appears to be a breakfast snack, Remains another soul’s dinner in disguise. I guess it just shows to go: Prepare an escape plan, Whenever the possibility exists.

Solace BartEdelman

If you’re searching for solace, You won’t find it here. Try the local liquor store, The dry cleaners on the corner, Or the understaffed post office Pregnant with dead letters galore, And holiday greeting cards. Please, don’t pay me a visit. I’m thoroughly up to my ears, Eyes, nose, mouth, and throat, Digesting what woe remains. Tell your sob stories to the priests At the Church of the Good Shepherd; After all, it’s their holy business. Leave me to my flatulent dog, Ungrateful kids, and irritable wife. I endure their constant demands Our dear family, such that we are. As concerns the rest of you, Seek peace where it resides. Just keep your distance from me.

Bart Edelman’s poetry collections include Crossing the Hackensack (Prometheus Press), Under Damaris’ Dress (Lightning Publications), The Alphabet of Love (Red Hen Press), The Gentle Man (Red Hen Press), The Last Mojito (Red Hen Press), The Geographer’s Wife (Red Hen Press), and Whistling to Trick the Wind (Meadowlark Press). He has taught at Glendale College, where he edited Eclipse, a literary journal, and, most recently, in the MFA program at Antioch University, Los Angeles. His work has been widely anthologized in textbooks. He lives in Pasadena, California.

T.S. Eliot was Wrong GeorgeFish

April is the cruelest month… (opening line of T.S. Eliot’s poem,“The Waste Land” - 1922)

But T.S. Eliot was wrong, very wrong, though picturesque, vivid, in his language:

April is not the cruelest month

January is.

January is cold, blustery, gets dark early in the evening, and remains dark till late in the morning.

January lacks all the gaiety of December (even if that gaiety is ofttimes forced, excessively commercial, even crass and artificial, and seems fueled solely by ethyl alcohol!); and yes, January lacks the anticipatory joy of late February, when spring is just around the seasonal corner.

January is the essence of bitter, cruel winter the time of illness, of flu, of brutal wind and bone-chilling cold: the month we cannot wait for to end, to finally be over with. But, alas! it is one of the longest months of the year, and seems so much longer than its actual thirty-one days!

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.

Nightmares of Slant

KarenL.George

~ Inspired by Escher's Relativity, 1953

What is it about a jumble of indoor staircases that recur in my dreams, so steep I’m in danger of tumbling backwards, narrow treads feet won’t fully fit on, toes poking risers, or open risers where creatures snatch my ankles from below? Dead-end landings, missing or rickety railings, rusted steel steps, wooden ones that squeak with each footfall, those that give way. Spiral, floating flights with air where the next stair should be. When age 10, I bolted from attic room to kitchen hallway, a game to see how fast I could thunder down them, never a thought of misstep, plummet. Now, 70 & arthritic, grateful for a ranch condo one step up from the garage, but care’s needed on icy, wet, uneven surfaces. Dreams of ascent and descent, never arriving where I want to go, staircase mazes make me ponder the brain

intricate inner grids, labyrinths of circuitry—miraculous, monstrous.

Karen L. George is a Kntucky author of three poetry collections from Dos Madres Press: Swim Your Way Back (2014), A Map and One Year (2018), and Where Wind Tastes Like Pears (2021). She won Slippery Elm’s 2022 Poetry Contest, and her short story collection, How We Fracture, which won the Rosemary Daniell Fiction Prize, is forthcoming from Minerva Rising Press in Spring 2023. Her work appears in Adirondack Review, Atticus Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Indianapolis Review, and Poet Lore. Her website is: https://karenlgeorge.blogspot.com/

I Grieve

NettieFarris

for the letter D: doomed, don’t, the dish ran away with the spoon.

Sometimes the Letter K

NettieFarris

is utterly silent: knighthood, knowledge. Strong and matter-of-fact.

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 Monocle. She lives in Floyds Knobs, Indiana.

This Poem Smells Blue

MykytaRyzhykh

This poem smells blue

The color of wrinkles in the sky

¶ Black shapes in clear water

This verse will be picked up by crows in the morning And they will be thrown from heaven

On icy concrete heart rocks ~

All in vain

[This poem was first published by Stone Poetry Journal]

Mykyta Ryzhykh lives in Ukraine and was a finalist of the Crimean fig competition and 2022 Pushcart Nominee (Tipton Poetry Journal). Mykyta has been published in the journals White Mammoth, Soloneba, Littsentr, Plumbum Press, Ukrainian Literary Gazette, Bukovynskyi Journal, Stone Poetry Journal, Tipton Poetry Journal, Alternate route, dyst journal, Better than Starbucks poetry & Fiction Journal, Allegro Poetry Magazine, Littoral Press, Asorn haiku Journal, Book of Matches, Ice Floe Press.and Literary Chernihiv.

Bodies in Water BruceRobinson

I’m not sure how it all began, except that we came from water, stray eddies of strife. And like the life we think we know, we found our way out, always fumbling, a torrent of paddling, a palimpsest of strokes. What was it that led us to each other despite the ambit that sways us first to one apparent shore,

then onto the next, unclear as to why we might shelter, uncertain where we might harbor? I was a swimmer so caught in the currency of laps and the

comfort of the warming flow; you nothing like a standing pool: you moved on.

Recent work by Bruce Robinson appears or is forthcoming in Tar River Poetry, Spoon River, Rattle, Mantis, Two Hawks Quarterly, Berkeley Poetry Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Last Stanza, and Aji. He has raced whippets in the midwest, and is part of that stubborn undercurrent in Brooklyn that continues to root for the Brooklyn Dodgers.

God’s Wings Jack J.Chielli

The starlings lifted from the field then coasted single file into a stand of trees where they chatted and whistled, then scattered from the branches, circled in unison and settled in the field movements repeated at a cadence known only to the collective

I wanted to understand their movements but the language hidden in their wings was known only to them

Such single-minded synchronicity, once thought to be messages from the Gods, holds the truth of what we all need to know to move as one in great numbers with a common purpose

They swirled and settled in the field all at once a soft purr arose as they communed with the meaning of oneness

I knelt to listen as the sun darkened from the sky

Jack J. Chielli is a writer living in Frederick, Maryland. He has an MA in poetry from Wilkes University and a BA in Writing from Roger Williams University. He has been writing since he was very young, in fact wanting to write is his first memory. He was editor of his collegiate literary magazine, Aldebaran. Jack also was a journalist for many years before working in politics. He is currently in higher education where he is vice president of enrollment management, marketing and communications. His poetry is forthcoming or has been published in Plainsongs, the anthology project Keystone: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania, Martin Lake Journal, Schuylkill Valley Journal , EcoTheo, Coal Hill Review, and Hole in the Head Review.

The Place Where We Began

CarrieEsposito

The metallic tang of blood and that white bathroom: the smell of cleaning fluid and my own. The metal bar which I don’t touch is cold. I am living in a concentration of the present where I do one cautious, conscious thing and then another. On repeat: a replay of my body's expulsion, a frenzy of voices Now a sterile tenuous quiet.

her body out there, separated yet so close she will always be so close

Things happen in steps now: squirt from the bottle, a gentle patting the crinkle of plastic opening, the satisfying stick to mesh a comfort somehow, the way it catches my discharge protecting me from draining away, freely leaking like my mammalian nipples aching to nourish the collection of fragile bone and miniature organs depending on me for survival even as I tend softly, longingly, briefly to the inside-out feeling of my skin.

Soon too soon we will leave this in-between place. We will wear clothes and go to restaurants, see family and make coffee and clean the kitchen. But every twenty something days, when the elemental smell rises I will be back when everything I had was within reach when nothing yet was known of who we would be, together.

Carrie Esposito’s work has been published in The Georgia Review, Ruminate Magazine, Monkey Bicycle, The MacGuffin, King Ludd’s Rag by Malarkey Books, Pif Magazine, Everyday Fiction, Mused, and the 4th edition of the Ms. Aligned anthology. She has a selected short featured on The Short Story Today podcast. Her first personal essay is forthcoming in Litro Magazine, and she has poetry published in Porcupine Literary and Nostalgia Press. Carrie is working on her novels, short stories, and poetry, and she is an Educational Consultant for Teaching Matters in the New York City schools. You can find her on Twitter @CarrieBEsposito and on her website www.carrieesposito.com.

Juanita H. MarkGoodman

No one knows what to do with her

Her and her kids

From Mexico via Houston

Then Illinois

Then here.

No job, no child support, no papers

Just a desperate hope and three cute kids

She worries

In English she worries

In Spanish she worries

Wringing her hands

Here comes the tears

Someone insulted her

Someone insulted her kids

Maybe not, she’s so hard to understand

We’re so hard to understand

No one can help her

No income

No papers

No assistance

No answers

She cries at a drop of a hat

We’ll extend her exit date

Another couple of weeks

She’s got 3 real cute kids.

Mark Goodman lives in Indianapolis.

Cabin Fever BrianDickson

Four days below ten degrees, and the three blind mice shuffled in with their placards complaining about the lack of pepper jack cheese.

We peer into their hole on their day off. The butcher’s wife on trial, chunks of tails as evidence, her statement: I’m innocent, your honors.

Damn furries have all the power, their canes flailing, sunglasses askew, their gibberish written in twine. What can we do, love?

See how we run with gossip to our neighbors, show our trial sketches without a glint of a blade.

When not teaching at the Community College of Denver, Brian Dickson avoids driving as much as possible to traipse around the front range region by foot, bike, bus or train with kids in tow. Past publications include two chapbooks, In a Heart’s Rut (HighFive press), Maybe This is How Tides Work (Finishing Line Press), and one book, All Points Radiant (WordTech, Cherry Grove Editions) and various journals, including Tipton Poetry Journal.

Not a Through Street

WilliamHuhn

Though others slept she could not sleep and went out walking on not a through street

As white as stars when winter blows was night as dark as a flock of crows her sorrow cold as summer's heat when she went walking on not a through street

Children of candy soldiers of home she dreamt of not being alone

but tried her heart at least to keep while walking along on not a through street

William Huhn has published dozens of poems in magazines and journals, including The Carolina Quarterly and BlazeVOX. Two of his essays have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Another, “The Seed of the Fruit” is forthcoming in Rosebud. He lives in Piermont, New York.

Notes on Design LeslieSchultz

If I yearned for the rococo, where would I go, here on the prairie?

Schooled by craftsman oak fine grain, fresh air, & sunlight I am surprised by excess.

Yet: behold these whorls chiseled by blue winds marking this grand facade of snow.

Leslie Schultz (Northfield, Minnesota) is the author of three collections of poetry, Still Life with Poppies: Elegies (Kelsay Books, 2016), Cloud Song (Kelsay Books, 2018)., and Concertina (Kelsay Books, 2019) Her poetry has appeared most recently in Poet Lore, North Dakota Quarterly, Able Muse, Blue Unicorn Journal, Light, Mezzo Cammin, Swamp Lily Review, Third Wednesday, The Madison Review, The Midwest Quarterly, The Orchards Poetry Journal, and The Wayfarer; in the sidewalks of Northfield; and in a chapbook, Living Room (Midwestern Writers’ Publishing House). She received a Pushcart Prize nomination in 2017 and has had three winning poems in the Maria W. Faust sonnet contest (2013, 2016, 2019). Schultz posts poems, photographs, and essays on her website: www.winonamedia.net.

The Poem of Trees

MichaelJ.Shepley

I saw this morning poetry that the trees wrote on the mirror of the waters of the winter pond at sunrise as they stood like naked black burnt skeletons in the tinfoil morning light of turn of year sun’s cipher false promising that heat will come

Maybe someday

But the trees in their zen patience scribbled cursive calligraphy elegiac if enigmatic and most probably cryptic even odd verses flat black in the ink of shadows

And otherwise in the breathless frenetic silence where the birds had balled all of themselves up into featherbeds in the nooks and boles and still shivered and would not even raise a peep I tried to break the black code of oak and beech maple and elm alder and old ash and could not make out even one lousy word

Michael J. Shepley is a writer who lives and works, still, in Sacramento, California. His poems have in the past appeared in Vallum, Common Ground, CQ, The Kerf, Blue Unicorn, Plainsongs, Salt & others.

Spectral Bodies

AmitShankarSaha

On my way back I wake up a sleeping pond.

A brash palm tree reclining on winds of dusk tears into its calm surface.

A slip road from the rail tracks leads to an abandoned shed.

Black and yellow station names stare at the grilled brightness inside windows of passing trains.

A nude sky dips into a dark night, a lost river meanders on its own bed.

A huddle of houses speak of all that we fear like crop circles do of oceans.

Far away a halogen light cries in spectral deep.

The moon-reaper with its scythe of sober light casts invisible shadows on our bodies.

Some nightmares still hang with the gossiping trees.

Amit Shankar Saha is the author of three highlyacclaimed collections of poems titled Balconies of Time, Fugitive Words, and Illicit Poems. He lives in Kolkata, India, edits EKL Review and works as an Assistant Professor in the English Department of Seacom Skills University. His most recent publication is A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Essayist.

PabloPiñeroStillmann

My father, when too depressed & to make up for it, would take me to the amusement park. There I would scream good screams. The screams belted out arms-raised on a loop-de-loop. When I got off a ride, always there he’d be, always waiting but also crying or dry heaving or punching the trunk of a plastic tree. I’d ask if he wanted to ride the Thunderbolt Flyer. He’d offer to get me food instead. Those delicious corndogs were confusing: soft on the inside yet crispy on the outside, squiggles of red & yellow crisscrossing to the top.

Pablo Piñero Stillmann’s work has appeared in Blackbird, Mississippi Review, Notre Dame Review, Washington Square Review, and other journals. He has published a novella, Temblador (Tierra Adentro, 2014), & a collection of short stories, Our Brains and the Brains of Miniature Sharks (Moon City Press, 2020). Last summer he attended the Sewanee Writers' Conference as a Tennessee Williams Scholar. Pablo lives in Mexico City.

Fade DavidDephy

We can feel beauty of silence, when tears upset us. We can see the essence of silence when we say goodbye. Sometimes I feel like Elvis never existed.

David Dephy is an award-winning poet and novelist. The founder of Poetry Orchestra and an author of poetry collections Eastern Star (Adelaide Books, 2020) and A Double Meaning with co-author Joshua Corwin (Adelaide Books, 2022). He has won awards from Bowery Poetry, Voices of Poetry, Statorec, Headline Poetry & Press and Cultural Daily. He lives and works in New York City.

Radio Signals MichaelKeshigian

Expressed as tinnitus most professionals profess is a ringing in the ears induced by stress and a number of other environmental tendencies. It’s said, that rambunctious mechanisms and music too loud can destroy the drums in the ear canal, ingesting caffeine is a culprit as well, its special buzz instigates the ears

to incessantly trill a variance of frequencies very high to low, white noise or static is the common explanation. The more sophisticated prefer to refer to the affliction as auditory acuity , much above the norm, an ability to detect signals and radio transmissions of interplanetary discussions, meant for only few to hear, with discourse duly noted, received day and night, lengthy conversations, concerning universal plight, divulging invaluable insight when the messages are decoded.

Michael Keshigian is the author of 14 poetry collections, his latest, What To Do With Intangibles, published by Cyberwit.net . Most recent poems have appeared in Muddy River Review, Sierra Nevada Review, Blue Pepper, San Pedro River Review, Comstock Review. Published in numerous national and international journals, he has 7 Pushcart Prize and 3 Best Of The Net nominations. . He lives in New Hampshire.

God on the Roof Kurt Olsson

About getting old, there’s less laundry to do. Imagine growing up in a town that only made gloves or shirt collars. Sometimes it’s okay not to speak in sentences. Were there non sequiturs before the Romans? Just when you think you know, Poof! Or imagine you saw a god on the roof across the alley nailing down new shingle all day. I’m not sure what to think about the magnetic poles and the fact they’re moving, but what if rats wrote their own history? The leftovers may have my name on them, but I’m not really sure why anymore.

Kurt Olsson has published two poetry collections. His second, Burning Down Disneyland (Gunpowder Press), won the Barry Spacks Prize. Of the book, contest judge Thomas Lux wrote, “I love the title of this book . . . and I love the innovative mischief of its poems. Let it be known: a true poetic intelligence and imagination live between its covers.” Olsson’s first collection, What Kills What Kills Us (Silverfish Review Press), won the Gerald Cable Book and was subsequently awarded the Towson University Prize for Literature, given to the best book published the previous year by a Maryland writer. Olsson’s poems have appeared in many journals, including Poetry, The New Republic, Southern Review, and The Threepenny Review.

Why I Won’t Move Back to the City PhillipaScott

When I fantasize about being single again I imagine Manhattan will welcome me back now that I’m an adult who knows the ropes

The M22 still stops across the street from the apartment I grew up in which is gone now, like the Fillmore East, and Azuma on 8th Street

The Met will beckon me on glorious summer evenings

I’ll survey my new life from a rooftop bar

Tomorrow, there’s a compelling talk at the 92nd Street Y where bearded men listen to Ezra Klein intently and a slim man with green eyes catches my eye

Maybe he’s ten years out of his marriage–enough time to have healed, gotten himself together enough time to know sampling from dating sites like dim sum, isn’t his taste

Still, all of that would require me to surrender–adjust to the sound of sirens at night tune out the clickity-clack of stilettos in the apartment above me at 3am like Morse code

telling me to go back home

Phillipa Scott is a writer, painter and native New Yorker. She has worked many corporate jobs to pay the rent. Her poetry has appeared in SLANT, Ragazine, Paterson Literary Review and is forthcoming in Exit 13 Magazine and Soul-Lit. Phillipa is the recipient of an Allen Ginsberg Award in Poetry. Her paintings are displayed in galleries in New York and New Jersey.

Knight Moves

GeneTwaronite

Playing chess with my computer, I struggle to relearn what, where, and how to move and now all I see is squares bathroom and floor tiles, crossword puzzles, the checkered blouse of the lady in front of me as pawns plod forward in dull straight paths, rooks zoom about in their rows and columns, bishops whiz diagonally back and forth, while king steps cautiously one square at a time and queen goes anywhere she damn pleases. But mostly it is knights I see moving in their crazy L’s two squares one way and then one square perpendicular the other way, or sometimes one square, then two charging into center position to capture an enemy piece or angling away to evade attack, jumping over every obstacle in their lively three-step dance around the board.

My knights may not be as valuable as other pieces, but I find them handy and formidable in tight corners and unpredictable, like the long game I play.

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. Gene has an MA in education, and leads a poetry workshop for the University of Arizona OLLI program. A former New Englander, Gene now lives in Tucson. Follow more of his poetry at genetwaronite.poet.com

Eating the Miles

WilliamGreenway

Nobody could pack a car trunk like he could, a wall of oddments shaped fitly together tighter than dick’s hatband, with no room for even a mouse fart. Then he would hold the needle at 60, claiming the Ford Fairlane would eat the two-lane miles all the way to Daytona, and in the dark of the back seat I would wonder why we couldn’t just eat 80 miles of the twelve hours to the beaches with just a whiff of condensed milk at the Okefenokee coffee stop gators out there in the swamp to get to stingrays and sharks, palm trees, and corn dogs on the boardwalk, the toe-pulling, once-a-year fishing dawns when the sky was creamsicle, the red dust of two-a-day football practices left behind.

This was over fifty years ago dreamed of again last night, the Spanish moss now hanging gray as an old man’s hair.

William Greenway’s 13th collection, As Long As We’re Here, is from FutureCycle Press. He has won the Helen and Laura Krout Memorial Poetry Award, the Larry Levis Editors’ Prize from Missouri Review, the Open Voice Poetry Award from The Writer's Voice, the State Street Press Chapbook Competition, an Ohio Arts Council Grant, an Academy of American Poets Prize, and was Georgia Author of the Year. Publications include Poetry, American Poetry Review, Southern Review, Missouri Review, Georgia Review, Southern Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, Poetry Northwest, and Shenandoah. Greenway is Distinguished Professor of English Emeritus at Youngstown State University, and now lives in Ephrata, Pennsylvania.

When laughter twists in panic MarkVogel

Surely no innocence remains long in this backwater where thick green sheen coats the surface, masking primal moves by creatures raised in murk. The smell of fish rot slows the historical record, which has forgotten how the New Madrid earthquake stopped time, created this cut-off horseshoe bend where the Mississippi once flowed left creatures that proliferated in the hierarchy of muds. No thin-skinned trout could survive in this still swamp. Instead, alligator gar crowds hang at the surface, endlessly patient in a psychedelic shimmer, oblivious to me standing with fishing rod in hand at this rough end of the road where boundaries dissolve what is within mixing with the humid outside. In this ancient scene real as day a vision appears, a childhood cartoon that again makes the frightening comical. A smart aleck skinny gar wearing a tux, singing with Louie Armstrong’s growly voice one more predator re-made into friendly spectacle. Amazed at what flickers in the heat, I watch a whole community of bullet-shaped gars float on the surface, all pointed teeth and bony ribs, ready to attack anything that moves even the very real zigzagging cotton-mouth water moccasin. In this meditative pause I accept all that is muddy and draped in green algae all that is dangerous and can wound. A gar long as my arm rushes at blue gill, makes them skitter and flee just like its ancestors did eons ago. In this sweating sauna I bond so naturally with these rough natives thriving in mosquito-rich heat. At home in this liquid essential poised in this Faulknerian hallucination I wait. Thin and bony after my travels far back into savage provinces, I know for sure I am back home.

Mark Vogel lives at the back of a Blue Ridge holler with his wife, Susan Weinberg, an accomplished fiction and creative non-fiction writer, and two foster sons. He currently is an Emeritus Professor of English at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina. Poems and short stories have appeared in several dozen literary journals.

Constellations ChristianWard

The first punch made you see Orion, Cassiopeia and Taurus. The second left a nebula's starling shades on your right cheek. Leo, Gemini, Auriga. The third made you slump like the Big Dipper against the changing room wall, your hand shaking from the sound of the family car; Canis Major and Ursa Major growling at the state of you, ready to wrestle.

Waiting for Spring ChristianWard

The earth coughs up snowdrops while we slowly defrost. Let me drink meltwater to remember what I stashed in the empty cave of a winter heart; to remember what must be renewed, not just consumed.

Christian Ward is a UK-based writer who has recently appeared in Open Minds Quarterly, Double Speak, Obsessed with Pipework, Primeval Monster, Clade Song, Uppagus and BlueHouse Journal.

Masks

RichardKrohn

Not what I expected, the lone guy in Spanish For Nurses, who’d scrawled Served in Iraq when I asked about exposure to other cultures, looming now from the back after our review of body parts, feelings, routines and foods,: Does it hurt you the head? Do you have hunger, thirst? The imperfect as used to, the perfect as has been, tallying pain, 0 to 10, how to say IV, ventilator, to be scared, broken, alone. He says that alien language and COVID masks remind him of drills in midday desert, the smallest gap between cheek and gasmask turning sweat to gushes of tears and snot, fingers fluttering down his face, and as he thumbs his phone I expect shots of buddies posed before the IEDs, or after, fitted with cutting-edge legs. Instead, the blur of a sonogram, another of him masked, holding his newborn daughter. Actually, they do the hard work, he says, waving at the women as they pack up. That was the only time, I swear, that I ever really lost it.

Host of the New Reality

RichardKrohn

Imagine a bold new TV reality, camera on its self-proclaimed creator, panning to a set filled with chirping birds. Beneath each shiny ficus, a teeming fish tank and bowl of untouchably perfect fruit.

He casts in his own image a trim, handsome man joined by willowy mate, both naked as newborns except for genital blurs, and thus the first week ends, which he pronounces great.

But by the next show they’ve bitten into the apples and soon he tells them

You’re fired! Commanded to cover up and leave, as they slink away, they’re joined by two brothers who bloody each other. One dies.

Season after season the cast swells, the babbling rabble disgraced by fraud and petty jealousy, by corrupt flushes, clogs and inevitable flood, their towering smallness, the Egypt of their debt.

And yet the creator sees himself above it all, magnificent, munificent even as the cast plague each other, mooning about the set as roaches abound, he the only one who can fix it.

And so it goes, no fit of scorpions or locusts, no reunion of diasporascattered cast, just the reality, slouching toward last disaster, at some point abruptly cancelled, and yet, he hopes, re-running forever

Richard Krohn has spent most of his life up and down the East Coast, but he has also spent many years in the Midwest and in Central America. He currently teaches Economics and Spanish at Moravian University in Pennsylvania. In addition to TPJ, his poetry is most commonly found in Tar River, Poet Lore, I-70, Rio Grande, Concho River and Paterson.

Orville Wright on Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, 1929

PhilipC.Kolin

We shipped the parts via sluggish milk trains from Dayton to the Outer Banks; they arrived before we did. The Algonquins had named the place Kitty Hawk and believed that in the afterlife they too could fly, brave hunters.

We chose this beach for its expanse of sand and lifting wind. No fences, rooftops, barbed fences, gawking bystanders. We wanted our gliders to be swift, and took weeks to assemble and test them on the other side of Kill Devil Hills.

We made over 700 test flights, sometimes 30 or more a day if the winds blessed our airfoils. If not, we were beached. But then came success-Wilbur soared for 12 seconds and covered over 120 feet. The salt spray was like a baptism; we gave birth to American aviation and wrote the Declaration of Independence for air travelers, freeing them from pesky nags and smelly smoke puffs.

How ironic that our achievement in the air was honored by a heavy monument on the Outer Banks made from 12 tons of concrete and two of granite. And sad that the termites ate the replicas of our gliders, a reminder that it may be impossible to forever slip the surly bonds of earth unless, of course, you were an Algonquin warrior.

Philip C. Kolin is the Distinguished Professor of English Emeritus and Editor Emeritus of the Southern Quarterly at the University of Southern Mississippi. He has published over 40 books on Tennessee Wiliams, Shakespeare, and contemporary African American women playwrights and including fifteen collections of poetry, among the most recent being Delta Tears: Poems (Main Street Mag, 2020), Americorona: Poems about the Pandemic (Wipf and Stock, 2021), and Mapping Trauma: Poems about Black History (Third World Press, 2023).

44

The cartographer DSMaolalai

with the tips of my fingers and both of my thumbs I peel and de-seed half an orange.

the segments shape shatter – pull cleanly apart, like tendons from boiled bones in soup. I bite greedy handfuls, leave skin on the table which flattens and folds in the sun.

it’s pretty, it dries under sunlight and folds out. looking close and carefully as it moves in the heat you can see a rough sketch-map of portugal.

DS Maolalai is a graduate of English Literature from Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland and, after some years abroad, currently lives in Dublin and and has been several times nominated for Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize. His poetry has been released in three collections, Love is Breaking Plates in the Garden (Encircle Press, 2016) Sad Havoc Among the Birds (Turas Press, 2019), and Noble Rot (Turas Press, 2022).

House of Silence

DanielEdwardMoore

What words want to do are crack like the knuckles of a fireman’s hands

as flaming verbs leap from the window into arms the size of a library flexing to break the fall.

The sound of metaphor scratching the wind makes you ponder the colorful choices chosen to protect the transparent parts. But darling, endings, like fingers and toes

can only take you so far. Maybe two sets of lips, shaped like not yet, will aim their wild, river of breath at your house of silence.

Daniel Edward Moore lives in Washington on Whidbey Island. His work is forthcoming in I-70 Review, Tar River Poetry Journal, Sierra Nevada Review, Bryant Literary Review and Book of Matches. His book, Waxing the Dents, is from Brick Road Poetry Press.

Mike, Me, Santa Monica Pier

TimothyRobbins

We never pass the coin-operated binoculars without remembering a street artist with blackened fingers drawing a boy whose shoulders heaved, a fasces of roses trembling on his knees. The artist blew unwanted charcoal from the two-dimensional face. Here he smoothed a shadow with his thumb. There he softened the upper lip. A crowd stood transfixed. We walked away as calmly as we could, considering we were fleeing inside. Through the smell of frying fat, the smell of colored lights, away from the boy’s tears, out over the water as far as we could go on a pier refined by its wooden limitations. All our future triumphs and failures, divided by eras of striving for nothing, were there some above, some below, all hidden fish and stars.

Timothy Robbins has published five volumes of poetry: Three New Poets (Hanging Loose Press), Denny’s Arbor Vitae (Adelaide Books), Carrying Bodies (Main Street Rag Press) Mother Wheel (Cholla Needles Press) and This Night I Sup in Your House (Cyberwit.net). He lives in Wisconsin with his husband of 25 years.

Review: Reckless Pilgrims by Allison Thorpe

ReviewedbyBarryHarris

Title: Reckless Pilgrims

Author: Allison Thorpe

Year: 2021

Publisher: Broadstone Books

Reckless Pilgrims is a collection of poems that document the author’s nearly 40 year journey of country living in her beloved Kentucky hills. Allison Thorpe, originally from Wisconsin, home-steaded in Metcalfe County, Kentucky for almost 40 years.

The opening poem of her collection, “Stone Ruins, Slater’s Field,” begins with a simple declaration, perhaps an invocation, concerning her pilgrimage.

Reckless pilgrims, we came to the land, bearing our hunger like a bony heart, our ragged dreams an open sea.

This first poem introduces us to the beginning of this pilgrimage. We hear about the country realtor who wove compelling stories about the stone ruins found there, perhaps to promote a sale. Did two old women living alone lure a preacher to their bed, operate a still, or bury bricks of gold on the property? As the prospective buyers first explore, they discover an old graveyard:

Past the hill, I stumbled over the first headstone; then we saw the rest ~~ a crooked fairyland circle under the cool umbrella of maple; lichen-graffitied grey stone crops like loose

roughened teeth of some giant lain to rest. Myrtle soothed the soil like prayer. . . and something unseen settled us to silence, something not quite like benediction.

The other reckless pilgrim is the author’s husband, a recovering Viet Nam veteran, introduced to us in “To the Boy I Remember, the Man I Came to Love.”

When your number came up, I wondered if I would ever see you again. . . You came home quiet, Da Nang, Ho Chi Minh, Saigon. . . You never talked about what happened no leeches, no malaria, no blood preferred instead singing to ponds patriotic with fish.

We see their relationship in other poems. First in “Old Enemies:”

Your faded camoflage shirt, fresh from sun and air, but scented still of jungles and decay, carrying the crease of some sharp-eyed certainty slung over your shoulder that I cannot iron out.

And again in “Last Night, the War Escaped:”

I soothe the battle from your brow wrap my arms gentle sentries to ease invasion.

Allison Thorpe is an accomplished storyteller and, at times, reminds me of a stand-up comic skillfully rendering a deft refer-back to a previous bit of humor. In “Duet for Zsa Zsa and the Repairman,” Zsa Zsa, who is a dog, trots “out of the woods, / old bone in her mouth” and mistakes a repairman for the poet’s husband.

. . . she realized her mistake, ears flattened, slinking off, confused, back to her bone, something in the world not right.

At the end of the poem, the poet recalls other times she, too, has encountered a similar mistake of identity.

I thought of the times I spotted a dark haired figure at the end of the grocery aisle, a blue pea coat in the crowd, the flash of a vehicle in the drive

I wished I had a bone.

Allison Thorpe has a way with words, especially her talent for conveying a new meaning for a phrase by crafting words together in new ways. For example, examine this wonderful extended metaphor from her poem “A Government of Snow.”

A government of snow has raged across this peaceful countryside, white tongued filibuster guting overrule, gristly congress of flakes, taxing even the most hospitable among us.

Elsewhere she describes Kentucky crows as “gosspers pecking the eyes from summer” and early spring like a dumbwaiter “hauling our mechanical hearts / Our hopeful freight / Into another fickle season.”

Reckless Pilgrims is filled with images of flowers, beans and tomatoes, weeds and other vegetation. Its pages are sectioned by names of flowers: Iris, Dandelion, Lilac and Forget Me Not. The reader is soon caught up as if their own world also consisted of the wildness and beauty of nature that Thorpe lovingly illustrates.

A few poems contrast country life with its opposite, after a move to the city. In “Planting Beans by the Moon on a Small City Balcony:”

I’m no Juliet, that’s for sure. though the moon winks like a fat Romeo, and this twelfth floor stage offers no earthy base beneath my feet

Long from the hills I’ve traveled, my fingers ache the dark crumble of soil,

that jagged geography of blue jay and hoot owl, of garden bright and fragrant.

In “The Plumb of Forgetting,” which TPJ originally published and nominated for the Pushcart Prize in 2017, Thorpe offers a vivid picture of moving on from the past.

blueberries. ginko biloba. slmon bury them in the yard one moon-bothered night

scissor that white t-shirt you sleep in the one still keening the room of him

then douse the velvet-wallowed darkness bless the stricken match

In her final poem in this collection, “Prayer for the Old Things,” we are left with a succinct benediction:

May we find value in what we are

Not in what we lack

May we, like the sun, wake and give light

Flaring our colors wildy

Before we tuck into darkness

Allison Thorpe is a prolific poet and writer. She lives in Kentucky. Though, in the past, her wandering feet have taken her across the country and back again, as well as to a few more distant locales. Her secret real life identity is Sylvia Ahrens.

She is a retired assistant professor with degrees in English Literature, Creative Writing, and Women's Studies and served on the board of the Kentucky Women Writers Conference for many years. Memberships include Kentucky State Poetry Society, LPS, Poezia, Ellie's Writers, and Buddha Girls. She lives in Lexington, Kentucky.

Allison is currently working at the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning where she provides mentoring services involving poetry, women's writing, editing, and revising.

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, Red-Headed 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.

Contributor Biographies

Gilbert Allen's most recent books are Believing in Two Bodies (a collection of poems) and The Beasts of Belladonna (a collection of linked stories). Since 1977 he has lived in Travelers Rest, South Carolina, with his wife, Barbara.

Jack J. Chielli is a writer living in Frederick, Maryland. He has an MA in poetry from Wilkes University and a BA in Writing from Roger Williams University. He has been writing since he was very young, in fact wanting to write is his first memory. He was editor of his collegiate literary magazine, Aldebaran. Jack also was a journalist for many years before working in politics. He is currently in higher education where he is vice president of enrollment management, marketing and communications. His poetry is forthcoming or has been published in Plainsongs, the anthology project Keystone: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania, Martin Lake Journal, Schuylkill Valley Journal , EcoTheo, Coal Hill Review, and Hole in the Head Review.

Holly Day’s writing has recently appeared in Analog SF, The Hong Kong Review, and Appalachian Journal, and her recent book publications include Music Composition for Dummies, The Tooth is the Largest Organ in the Human Body, and Bound in Ice. She lives in Minneapolis and teaches creative writing at The Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis and Hugo House in Seattle.

David Dephy is an award-winning poet and novelist. The founder of Poetry Orchestra and an author of poetry collections Eastern Star (Adelaide Books, 2020) and A Double Meaning with co-author Joshua Corwin (Adelaide Books, 2022). He has won awards from Bowery Poetry, Voices of Poetry, Statorec, Headline Poetry & Press and Cultural Daily. He lives and works in New York City.

When not teaching at the Community College of Denver, Brian Dickson avoids driving as much as possible to traipse around the front range region by foot, bike, bus or train with kids in tow. Past publications include two chapbooks, In a Heart’s Rut (HighFive press), Maybe This is How Tides Work (Finishing Line Press), and one book, All Points Radiant (WordTech, Cherry Grove Editions) and various journals, including Tipton Poetry Journal.

Bart Edelman’s poetry collections include Crossing the Hackensack (Prometheus Press), Under Damaris’ Dress (Lightning Publications), The Alphabet of Love (Red Hen Press), The Gentle Man (Red Hen Press), The Last Mojito (Red Hen Press), The Geographer’s Wife (Red Hen Press), and Whistling to Trick the Wind (Meadowlark Press). He has taught at Glendale College, where he edited Eclipse, a literary journal, and, most recently, in the MFA program at Antioch University, Los Angeles. His work has been widely anthologized in textbooks. He lives in Pasadena, California.

Carrie Esposito’s work has been published in The Georgia Review, Ruminate Magazine, Monkey Bicycle, The MacGuffin, King Ludd’s Rag by Malarkey Books, Pif Magazine, Everyday Fiction, Mused, and the 4th edition of the Ms. Aligned anthology. She has a selected short featured on The Short Story Today podcast. Her first personal essay is forthcoming in Litro Magazine, and she has poetry published in Porcupine Literary and Nostalgia Press. Carrie is working on her novels, short stories, and poetry, and she is an Educational Consultant for Teaching Matters in the New York City schools. You can find her on Twitter @CarrieBEsposito and on her website www.carrieesposito.com.

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 Monocle. She lives in Floyds Knobs, Indiana.

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.

Karen L. George is a Kentucky author of three poetry collections from Dos Madres Press: Swim Your Way Back (2014), A Map and One Year (2018), and Where Wind Tastes Like Pears (2021). She won Slippery Elm’s 2022 Poetry Contest, and her short story collection, How We Fracture, which won the Rosemary Daniell Fiction Prize, is forthcoming from Minerva Rising Press in Spring 2023. Her work appears in Adirondack Review, Atticus Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Indianapolis Review, and Poet Lore. Her website is: https://karenlgeorge.blogspot.com/.

Mark Goodman lives in Indianapolis.

William Greenway’s 13th collection, As Long As We’re Here, is from FutureCycle Press. He has won the Helen and Laura Krout Memorial Poetry Award, the Larry Levis Editors’ Prize from Missouri Review, the Open Voice Poetry Award from The Writer's Voice, the State Street Press Chapbook Competition, an Ohio Arts Council Grant, an Academy of American Poets Prize, and was Georgia Author of the Year. Publications include Poetry, American Poetry Review, Southern Review, Missouri Review, Georgia Review, Southern Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, Poetry Northwest, and Shenandoah. Greenway is Distinguished Professor of English Emeritus at Youngstown State University, and now lives in Ephrata, Pennsylvania.

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.

Elisabeth Harrahy’s work has appeared in Zone 3, Constellations, The Café Review, Tipton Poetry Journal, Passengers Journal, Ghost City Review, I-70 Review and elsewhere, and has been nominated for Best of the Net. She received an Editor’s Choice Award in the Paterson Literary Review’s 2021 Allen Ginsberg Poetry Contest. She is an associate professor of biology at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater.

Katherine Hoerth is the author of five poetry collections, including the forthcoming Flare Stacks in Full Bloom (Texas Review Press, 2021). She is an assistant professor at Lamar University and editor of Lamar University Literary Press. Her writing interests include eco-poetry, feminism, and formalism. She is a member of the Texas Institute of Letters and lives near Houston.

Williamn Huhn has published dozens of poems in magazines and journals, including The Carolina Quarterly and BlazeVOX. Two of his essays have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Another, “The Seed of the Fruit” is forthcoming in Rosebud. He lives in Piermont, New York.

Patricia Joslin is a retired educator, an avid (but not athletic) golfer and an active volunteer in the Charlotte, North Carolina community. She recently completed a chapbook collection, I’ll Buy Flowers Again Tomorrow: Poems of Loss and Healing which will be published by Charlotte Lit Press this spring. Two of her poems have appeared in Kakalak 2021 and 2022.

Michael Keshigian is the author of 14 poetry collections, his latest, What To Do With Intangibles, published by Cyberwit.net . Most recent poems have appeared in Muddy River Review, Sierra Nevada Review, Blue Pepper, San Pedro River Review, Comstock Review. Published in numerous national and international journals, he has 7 Pushcart Prize and 3 Best Of The Net nominations. He lives in New Hampshire.

Philip C. Kolin is the Distinguished Professor of English Emeritus and Editor Emeritus of the Southern Quarterly at the University of Southern Mississippi. He has published over 40 books on Tennessee Wiliams, Shakespeare, and contemporary African American women playwrights and including fifteen collections of poetry, among the most recent being Delta Tears: Poems (Main Street Mag, 2020), Americorona: Poems about the Pandemic (Wipf and Stock, 2021), and Mapping Trauma: Poems about Black History (Third World Press, 2023).

Ted Kooser is Presidential Professor Emeritus at The University of Nebraska, where he taught the writing of poetry. He worked for many years as a life insurance executive; now retired and teaching half time at the University of Nebraska, Ted lives in Garland, Nebraska. His most recent book is Cotton Candy: Poems Dipped Out of the Air (University of Nebraska Press, 2022).

Richard Krohn has spent most of his life up and down the East Coast, but he has also spent many years in the Midwest and in Central America. He currently teaches Economics and Spanish at Moravian University in Pennsylvania. In addition to TPJ, his poetry is most commonly found in Tar River, Poet Lore, I-70, Rio Grande, Concho River and Paterson.

Lynette Lamp is a practicing family physician and recent graduate of the Spalding University MFA program. She has had previous poems published in JAMA (Journal of American Medical Association), The Pharos, and Annals of Internal Medicine. Lynette lives in Winona, Minnesota.

DS Maolalai is a graduate of English Literature from Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland and, after some years abroad, currently lives in Dublin and and has been several times nominated for Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize. His poetry has been released in three collections, Love is Breaking Plates in the Garden (Encircle Press, 2016) Sad Havoc Among the Birds (Turas Press, 2019), and Noble Rot (Turas Press, 2022).

Robert M. O’Brien’s career was spent mostly in radio and television, starting with CBS News in New York City, where he walked in off the street with a degree in communications one day and went to work that day. He is now a full-time writer and occasional photographer living in Meeker, Colorado.

Karen O’Leary is a writer and editor from West Fargo, North Dakota. She has published poetry, short stories, and articles in a variety of venues including, Frogpond, Setu, Fine Lines, Atlas Poetica and NeverEnding Story. Karen edited an international online journal called Whispers http://whispersinthewind333.blogspot.com/ for 5 ½ years. She enjoys sharing the gift of words.

Kurt Olsson has published two poetry collections. His second, Burning Down Disneyland (Gunpowder Press), won the Barry Spacks Prize. Of the book, contest judge Thomas Lux wrote, “I love the title of this book . . . and I love the innovative mischief of its poems. Let it be known: a true poetic intelligence and imagination live between its covers.” Olsson’s first collection, What Kills What Kills Us (Silverfish Review Press), won the Gerald Cable Book and was subsequently awarded the Towson University Prize for Literature, given to the best book published the previous year by a Maryland writer. Olsson’s poems have appeared in many journals, including Poetry, The New Republic, Southern Review, and The Threepenny Review.

Timothy Robbins has published five volumes of poetry: Three New Poets (Hanging Loose Press), Denny’s Arbor Vitae (Adelaide Books), Carrying Bodies (Main Street Rag Press) Mother Wheel (Cholla Needles Press) and This Night I Sup in Your House (Cyberwit.net). He lives in Wisconsin with his husband of 25 years.

Recent work by Bruce Robinson appears or is forthcoming in Tar River Poetry, Spoon River, Rattle, Mantis, Two Hawks Quarterly, Berkeley Poetry Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Last Stanza, and Aji. He has raced whippets in the midwest, and is part of that stubborn undercurrent in Brooklyn that continues to root for the Brooklyn Dodgers.

Mykyta Ryzhykh lives in Ukraine and was a finalist of the Crimean fig competition and 2022 Pushcart Nominee (Tipton Poetry Journal). Mykyta has been published in the journals White Mammoth, Soloneba, Littsentr, Plumbum Press, Ukrainian Literary Gazette, Bukovynskyi Journal, Stone Poetry Journal, Tipton Poetry Journal, Alternate route, dyst journal, Better than Starbucks poetry & Fiction Journal, Allegro Poetry Magazine, Littoral Press, Asorn haiku Journal, Book of Matches, Ice Floe Press.and Literary Chernihiv.

Amit Shankar Saha is the author of three highly-acclaimed collections of poems titled Balconies of Time, Fugitive Words, and Illicit Poems. He lives in Kolkata, India, edits EKL Review and works as an Assistant Professor in the English Department of Seacom Skills University. His most recent publication is A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Essayist.

Leslie Schultz (Northfield, Minnesota) is the author of three collections of poetry, Still Life with Poppies: Elegies (Kelsay Books, 2016), Cloud Song (Kelsay Books, 2018)., and Concertina (Kelsay Books, 2019) Her poetry has appeared most recently in Poet Lore, North Dakota Quarterly, Able Muse, Blue Unicorn Journal, Light, Mezzo Cammin, Swamp Lily Review, Third Wednesday, The Madison Review, The Midwest Quarterly, The Orchards Poetry Journal, and The Wayfarer; in the sidewalks of Northfield; and in a chapbook, Living Room (Midwestern Writers’ Publishing House). She received a Pushcart Prize nomination in 2017 and has had three winning poems in the Maria W. Faust sonnet contest (2013, 2016, 2019). Schultz posts poems, photographs, and essays on her website: www.winonamedia.net.

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

Phillipa Scott is a writer, painter and native New Yorker. She has worked many corporate jobs to pay the rent. Her poetry has appeared in SLANT, Ragazine, Paterson Literary Review and is forthcoming in Exit 13 Magazine and Soul-Lit. Phillipa is the recipient of an Allen Ginsberg Award in Poetry. Her paintings are displayed in galleries in New York and New Jersey.

Michael J. Shepley is a writer who lives and works, still, in Sacramento, California. His poems have in the past appeared in Vallum, Common Ground, CQ, The Kerf, Blue Unicorn, Plainsongs, Salt & others.

Jeanine Stevens is the author of No Lunch Among the Day Stars (Cold River Press, 2022), and chapbooks, Ornate Persona (Clair Songbirds Press, 2022) and Tea in the Nun’s Liibrary, (Eyewear Publishing, UK, 2022). She is winner of the MacGuffin Poet Hunt and The Ekphrasis Prize. She is winner of the MacGuffin Poet Hunt, WOMR Cape Cod Community Radio National Award, and The William Stafford Award. Jeanine has been published in Evansville Review, North Dakota Review, Chiron Review, Poets’ Espresso Review, and others. Jeanine is Professor Emerita at American River College in Sacramento.

Pablo Piñero Stillmann’s work has appeared in Blackbird, Mississippi Review, Notre Dame Review, Washington Square Review, and other journals. He has published a novella, Temblador (Tierra Adentro, 2014), & a collection of short stories, Our Brains and the Brains of Miniature Sharks (Moon City Press, 2020). Last summer he attended the Sewanee Writers' Conference as a Tennessee Williams Scholar. Pablo lives in Mexico City.

Wally Swist’s books include Huang Po and the Dimensions of Love (Southern Illinois University Press, 2012), selected by Yusef Komunyakaa as co-winner in the 2011 Crab Orchard Series Open Poetry Contest, and A Bird Who Seems to Know Me: Poems Regarding Birds & Nature (Ex Ophidia Press, 2019), the winner of the 2018 Ex Ophidia Press Poetry Prize. His recent poems have appeared in Asymptote, Chicago Quarterly Review, Hunger Mountain: Vermont College of Fine Arts Journal, The Montreal Review, Pensive: A Global Journal of Spirituality and the Arts, Poetry London, Scoundrel Time, and The Seventh Quarry Poetry Magazine. Wally lives in Massachusetts.

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. Gene has an MA in education, and leads a poetry workshop for the University of Arizona OLLI program. A former New Englander, Gene now lives in Tucson. Follow more of his poetry at genetwaronite.poet.com

Mark Vogel lives at the back of a Blue Ridge holler with his wife, Susan Weinberg, an accomplished fiction and creative non-fiction writer, and two foster sons. He currently is an Emeritus Professor of English at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina. Poems and short stories have appeared in several dozen literary journals.

Christian Ward is a UK-based writer who has recently appeared in Open Minds Quarterly, Double Speak, Obsessed with Pipework, Primeval Monster, Clade Song, Uppagus and BlueHouse Journal.

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.