Tipton Poetry Journal #56 (Spring 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 35 poets from the United States (20 unique states), and 1 poet from Ukraine.

Our Featured Poem this issue is “Colander,” written by Carol Tyx. Carol’s poem, which also receives an award of $25, can be found on page 3. The featured poem was chosen by the Board of Directors of Brick Street Poetry, Inc., the Indiana non-profit organization who publishes Tipton Poetry Journal.

Barry Harris reviews No Lunch Among the Day Stars by Jeanine Stevens.

Joyce Brinkman reviews Daybreak and Deep by Jessica D. Thompson.

Cover Photo: West Virginia Morning by Harold Furr.

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.

These Premises Have Been Sealed. All Persons Are Forbidden to Enter. AvraWing

About to check my new apartment I spot the blue NYPD notice posted on 8E’s door. Something happened next to where I don’t yet live to the neighbor not yet a neighbor. Angela, a friend of a friend, up in 12A, tells me Todd killed himself on Monday. Had been depressed since his partner died last year.

We all mourn something, each loss an echo of the last. Todd’s sorrow is not mine, just adjacent, yet as if a set of keys gives me access to his grief, I need to have known him, to imagine what I would have said to him, to wish he’d looked out his window toward the harbor once more and thought, Well, not the best view, but not bad.

Avra Wing’s poetry appeared most recently in Constellations, The American Journal of Poetry, The Hollins Critic, and Cimarron Review, and is upcoming in I-70 Review. She is the author of two novels: Angie, I Says, made into the movie, Angie, and After Isaac, for young adults. Avra lives in Brooklyn.

Garlic Press

DaveMalone

In a divorce you often lose things: a child, a home, a lawn, a divan, sometimes your dignity, and very often a garlic press.

You need it for a cranberry salad with minestrone soup, and you rifle through drawers with the same frenetic fingers you ransacked closets with months ago for that one photograph, not yet bent on being a keepsake, if found it might keep you together, solidify this relationship until death do us.

Poet and filmmaker Dave Malone lives in the Missouri Ozarks. His latest poetry volume is Tornado Drill (Aldrich Press, 2022), and his poems have appeared in Plainsongs, San Pedro River Review, and Delta Poetry Review. He can be found online at davemalone.net or via Instagram @dave.malone.

Colander CarolTyx

The mice have chewed through my colander. I’m not sure what allure plastic holds, but they’ve gnawed a space big enough for a bean or a slippery noodle. to slide through.

Not sure what to do with a holey colander, I turn to metaphor. Maybe it’s what God is trying to do with me, find a way to slip through my hard surface, gnaw whatever keeps love from getting through.

Carol Tyx lives in Iowa City, where she raises her voice in the community sing movement and supports community-based agriculture. A professor emeritus at Mt. Mercy University, Tyx is the winner of a Willow Run Poetry Book Award for Remaking Achilles: Slicing into Angola’s History. Her work has recently appeared in Poetry East, Big Muddy, and Rising to the Rim (Brick Road Poetry Press). She also makes a phenomenal strawberry rhubarb pie.

Murdered Gene Twaronite

The sun is up and it’s already ninety but he sleeps like a baby, nestled against his security boulder, wrapped in carpet padding with only his sandaled feet protruding, as if murdered in the night.

His current home is a small city park, up the street from the last place he found behind the wall of shrubs on the corner of my gated apartments until evicted when management cut back the shrubs and exposed his bedroom to the mean city streets.

He was here when I arrived and likely will be here when I move. For now, he is a part of my world, and I a part of his, enough for us to wave and greet each other whenever I pass by.

Of his life I know nothing, where he came from or what he dreams about each night. I know him only from the occasional times I overhear him loudly arguing with himself and by his gentle demeanor, the way he roams alone through the streets like a bearded prophet.

I left him money one Christmas day, a holiday I no longer believe in, though I fancied he might, remembering a warm house full of bright lights and distant faces round a big table, but this hardly makes me a saint.

If I really wanted to do something, I’d invite him to stay with me. But that would be too hard. So I go on as if that’s the way it is.

I pretend that he’ll be there tomorrow and the next day until one day he won’t and no one will wonder where he went. For all we know he was murdered in the night.

Could Be Lovely

GeneTwaronite

Your hands clutch tightly, pulling apart as you pull on the other, fearful of being alone and fearful of being swallowed, seeing but refusing to enter the deep wood that could be lovely if only you could let go of the sovereign he or she and clasp the hand of they to see the forest and the trees.

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 MexicoArizona 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

Gaslight

TiaPaul-Louis

The gaslights flicker. Eyes on me. Mines twitch –flipping pages to recall what I touched and didn’t feel, switches I might’ve made or pulled out of rush or daydream.

It is times like these when I pour myself every liquor I was taught were for drunkards and their prostitutes – times when I sit behind the cypress handsomely peaked in the front yard – times when I cry out to my God:

Here I am but why? Times He rarely responds, until

a winded silence numbs, divides, and sweeps me. Through my parting from flesh to flame, I can finally sense the love and attention I desired and why they couldn’t be mine.

Alive, assembled but ashamed,

I’m a toddler screaming and stomping with my cup spilled all over, without a mother to calm, clean, or correct me, but with eyes on me

begging for memories

I do not have and cannot fulfill.

Battered TiaPaul-Louis

Must we miss houses we suffered in and hold hands that crushed ours? Why do stones engraved with names in ages seek our warmth more than the bodies we’ve fed and caressed? Must we lay under the linens we bled on then fold them again, drink of the wines and spirits that forced us to obey then fall to the knees that call us prey? Are we cowards to flee hunters or are they gods to whom we’re sacrificed?

Tia Paul-Louis is a fiction writer and poet from Florida. She began experimenting with songwriting at age 11 and later felt a deeper connection to poetry. Her themes portray family life, gender role controversies, mental health, and spiritual values. She admires the freedom of expression in most forms of art such as music, acting, and painting.

A Rising Rugby Star Dies in a Slurry Pit LizDolan

Hillsborough, County Down, September 15, 2012

He must have thought it another bloody rough and tumble scrum, a bone crushing brawl heads bashing, the thud of bodies, skin burning, eyes mud-blinded arms and legs slipping through his fingers. Sin-binned.

But he was on his farm. Sweet-scented breezes slipped down from Slievenamon. The Holsteins lowed in the upper pasture as twilight flooded his fields, a buzz saw snap from where he first played in Ballynahinch.

And from my mother’s grassy-knolled farm where on summer nights a hundred couples quickstepped under a canopy like one wild whirlwind and I, spun by powerful men like him who radiated such heat, I thought they had sprung whole from loamy peat. "Bejesus," he must have said to himself. "Holy shit.”

At the last, memories looked back at him with greedy eyes: pricking his tiny fingers picking blueberries, running the leather with his brother and his Da. He must have extended his hand to them. "Up the field, boys," his sister swore she heard him say when she went out to call them to supper.

And then the full press, the kick, the thrill of rushing them all home.

A nine time Pushcart nominee in both prose and poetry, Liz Dolan has published two poetry collections. Her ten grandchildren pepper her life. Liz lives in Rehobeth Beach, Delaware.

If I banished you, I’d have one fewer pause, one fewer percussive my baton could coax in, when rests and their measurestretched or quarter-note hushes (what hangs between raindrops and their patter) matter a more-than-comma clearing among dank vines; a whitewashed frame for a friend’s first, halting phrase; a blinking red light at the fork where I turn the GPS off and decide to be kind.

If I shrug and agree you’re too fusty to be retro yet a stile between fields in some forgotten fairy tale how will anyone herd lists that straggle as they graze, or latch a friar’s acre of silence, or convey the hover of an eyelash about to kiss an ear.

[This poem was first published in Steven Riel’s Edgemere (Liy Poetry Review Books, 2020)]

Steven Riel is the author of two full-length collections of poetry: Fellow Odd Fellow and Edgemere. His chapbook Postcard from P-town was published as runner-up for the inaugural Robin Becker Chapbook Prize. His poems have appeared in The Minnesota Review and International Poetry Review. He edits the Franco-American journal Résonance and lives in Massachusetts.

Desecration

SiobhanJean-Charles

If my body is a temple, why does it need renovation, a trim, pluck, shave, the only wax fills my ears, my candleholders. The body is a temple

and you burn, pillage it. Split the altar, scatter the incense, take everything holy and leave only bones to pray to.

Siobhan Jean-Charles is an English major at Salisbury University on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. Her work has appeared or will appear in Dark River Review, Furrow, Polaris, Redactions: Poetry and Poetics, The Tusculum Review, and The Shore Poetry, where she is the Social Media Manager.

Halo ShinWatanabe

they glazed the windows in bulbous abdomen spiders and my eyes so close to windows you are somewhere away in the city

yellow spider

clean glass

yellow body

black arms winged meat to jaws

I do not particularly like the red scarf you gave me I toss it

out of the window I watch spiders drive tiny boxes tiny bodies burning in boxes tiny thoughts drowning arachnid specks the spider in me and in everyone

thursday I stepped on a spider who did not deserve it place a single cheerio on its head

I wrap your pile of letters with my pillowcase and squeeze the sustenance in spiderliness

on my window spiders spin crystal silk in their hands wrap flesh neither theirs nor mine other as if the juice had meaning

Shin Watanabe was born in Gainesville, Florida and has lived in New York, New Jersey, Minnesota, and Nevada. He studied philosophy at the University of Minnesota and received an MFA in poetry at the University of Las Vegas. Shin is currently a PhD candidate in English with a creative dissertation in poetry at Binghamton University. His poetry has appeared previously in the Colorado Review and the I-70 Review

vodka and Sprite

LizJacoby

it is close to midnight when the rain starts to hit the window of the old kitchen a 74-year-old man sits in a half drunken stupor yelling at ghosts

after the bottle is dry he tends to the dogs at 2 or 3 am since his horse has been dead 20 years chickens and the coop are but memory like Aunt Iva’s house that once sat across the drive

vodka and Sprite turn him into the monster I have been warned of carries over into the doldrums of an alcoholic’s early morning rant infected with powerlessness

the past has abandoned him anchoring the pain inside fueling a mythos

the farmland has been placed into government programs so strangers visit and when they do sadness is palpable as he speaks aside lake water that pretends not to notice his reflection.

the gytrash LizJacoby

lives in the empty space of sinew and marrow burrowed long ago into cavern like structures of depths unknown underneath vigorous strides she kneads with her knuckles effectuating flesh and blood as outmost heavenly bodies flow freely she emerges from a cardinal grotto her velvet and silver ears scrape tendon and bone muscles taut and alert as she creeps in and around the hollows

Liz Jacoby lives in southeast Michigan, but her heart is in Southern Illinois. She has work forthcoming in The Vehicle and she has recenty published in Transom.

Her Way RogerPfingston

After my dad died at 86 my mother carried on in the small house that my brothers and I grew up in, a house with a half basement and a crawl space where we could’ve grown mushrooms among the spiders and slugs and other creatures more imagined than real. There were stairs, of course, a steep decline that became the focus of my mother’s determination as she entered her eighties, then her nineties, a worrisome thing given that both the washer and dryer sat below the kitchen floor. She confessed to us when we asked about the ups and downs of “wash day” and maybe it was time to think about some help that she simply stands at the top stair and tosses the full basket that sometimes bounces once or twice before scattering the contents over the floor. Then she sits and scoots down the flight, her right hand on the only railing, a book in her left to read while she waits. Once the clothes are washed and dried, she fills the basket and uses it as a “walker” of sorts, lifting and placing until she arrives at the top, turns out the light, closes the door and takes two more stairs into the kitchen where she rests the basket on the dining table. Moments later, having had a drink of water and maybe some apple sauce, she makes her way to the bedroom where she places the basket on the bed. At this point in the telling, and beaming with closure, she said she turns the radio on before the folding begins, and if it’s a winter day she just sits awhile, listening to the music, with a warm armful of sheets and towels.

Teller

RogerPfingston

She was still new in his eyes even though it had been six weeks or more since she first appeared in the blue dress, long pigtails framing the Renaissance roundness of her face, probably fresh out of college, counting his cash... four twenties, two tens and a fifty for some weekend nonsense, suddenly the personal touch of his first name on her lips in spite of his age Color me gray, he’d said, bald but bearded, confessing his frequent preference for cash, leaving unsaid his imagined addiction to plastic, the hacked ruin of online banking, the bad guys always one step ahead. And then, that knowing smile, something about her grandparents before the transaction lapsed into the ordinary “have a good day,” though not before his usual ploy of requesting an envelope for those crisp bills, the slow tuck into his shirt pocket…the guy behind him a pressing matter, repeatedly clearing his throat.

A retired teacher of English and photography, Roger Pfingston is the recipient of a poetry fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and two PEN Syndicated Fiction Awards. He has poems in recent issues of I-70 Review, Innisfree Poetry Journal, Salt, The Flying Island, Midwest Review, and Sheila-Na-Gig. His latest chapbook, What’s Given, is available from Kattywompus Press. Roger lives in Bloomington, Indiana.

Try Every Nickname

MarySalisbury

Collecting a chord of your laughter, I will shape you back together. Your hammer beside your circular saw. The birdhouse not yet finished.

I will join the edges, hoping it’s what you would have wanted.

I will gather your paintbrushes, rinsing each one until all trace of the red rhododendron has vanished.

I can’t be here without you.

Your sander is covered with sawdust and your workbench is littered with carpenter’s pencils and screws.

You and me sitting on the patio, still trying to spot the oriole we hear singing, the beginning and ending of each day.

Mary Salisbury’s poetry has been published in Calyx and Michigan Quarterly Review. An Oregon Literary Arts Fellowship recipient, Mary earned her MFA (fiction) from Pacific University. Her fiction has been published in The Whitefish Review and Cutthroat. Salisbury’s story collection, Side Effects of Wanting, was published by Main Street Rag.

The Bell JimTilley

On a path in the woods, I met an off-leash dog sporting a large cow bell, the dog’s matted fur hanging like rags. Around a bend in the trail, I met the dog’s gaunt master wearing a mud-streaked windbreaker with a ripped sleeve, his tangled gray hair hanging in thick strings to his shoulders, his bulbous, veined nose as prominent as the dog’s snout. Both dog and man appeared somewhat lost. I wondered why the man wasn’t wearing a bell too. He looked unkempt, unfed, homeless. Penniless, I thought. Maybe I should buy him a dinner and the dog some food, take them both to a shelter for the night. Yet, I kept on going. Sometimes, a person, even a dog, doesn’t know where to go, but merely goes anyway. Sometimes, the thoughts that tag along take a turn. A year later, I met the same man, same dog, on the same trail, and this time, I joined them. We walked together out of the woods, talking over that clanging bell, this time in the winter’s cold, the dog clad in somewhat less-filthy fur, the man in an orange toque and navy coat hanging down below his knees. Back on the bike path, I watched them mount a low sandy ridge, descend to a paved street, then enter the driveway of a one-story Cape-style home. He opened the front door.

Jim Tilley lives in New York and has published three full-length collections of poetry (In Confidence, Cruising at Sixty to Seventy, Lessons from Summer Camp) and a novel (Against the Wind) with Red Hen Press. His short memoir, The Elegant Solution, was published as a Ploughshares Solo. He has won Sycamore Review’s Wabash Prize for Poetry. Four of his poems have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

Backpack on Bench

DianeWebster

The backpack sits like a son beside his father on the bench watching traffic pass by in anonymous rainbow cars until a mud puddle splashes; a peacock tail of rain water across the two observers.

The man sits like a backpack beside the boy running away with all his possessions stuffed in duffel bag wrinkles awaiting a ride away like raindrops wiped from a windshield’s vision.

Diane Webster retired in 2022 after working 40 years at a local newspaper. Her work has appeared in El Portal, North Dakota Quarterly, New English Review and other literary magazines. She also had a micro-chap published by Origami Poetry Press in 2022. A poem of Diane's was nominated for Best of the Net by Star 82 in 2022 as well. She lives in Colorado.

The Obscure Darkness of Inanimate Things KenMeisel

Now they are gazing high up into twilight to catch the birds there, birds just lopsided, floating, lofting, and he, just now, softly touches her shoulders – she’s in front of him, they’re sitting quietly together on a bench in a little park outside of a favorite church of theirs, one they visit whenever they’re traveling again to this city –and he pulls her to him, closely, so he can feel her breath heaving soft across his knuckles as she sighs, as she releases all the tension and the weariness of the day and she rocks backward, into him, into that old security of his chest,

and, without words now, because they already know it, this familiar safe intimacy, she cups both his hands in hers so that they’re sculpted, joined as one, accepted just like one of the stone statues of saints planted here, and a flourish of coal-black birds ascends up and over and across the pointed church steeple in a flight of ink so that both of them see only a dark smear, a transposition of inked lines soaring across, around and past the steeple and over the rounded dome of the church behind it so that when she turns, abruptly, to tell him some secret, some confession she’s been withholding from him for maybe a month or a fore night, and she kisses him, melts herself into him, birds kiss too, across their moist opened lips, and the newness of it is too much, it’s carnal knowledge again, it’s saying one thing and yet meaning completely another and it points to everything else and it’s what they do when they come together and fall into that unconscious poetry that unites and unties them just as the bells of the steeple start ring-banging loudly, madly, and the black birds become the history of one soul rising upward over that little green park outside the church and all over the wet stone paths that blend into gardens and the fresco walls that hold wild souls of the saints dead so that what is remembered is faith, or love, something that cannot ever be forced because they’re in the temple of time – the enormous mindless space of it – and all that is happening in the universe, is in the body, too, theirs right now, so that when they complete the kiss, there is a realm that hides the world from them so that they can, again, grow a seed in the heart of the earth between them, and it’s an exodus back home – something private, in bundled hands that hold enough good gold in them to throw a path of daylight swept clean –through the obscure darkness of inanimate things.

Ken Meisel is a poet and psychotherapist, a 2012 Kresge Arts Literary Fellow, a Pushcart Prize nominee and the author of eight books of poetry. His most recent books are: Our Common Souls: New & Selected Poems of Detroit (Blue Horse Press: 2020) and Mortal Lullabies (FutureCycle Press: 2018). Meisel has recent work in Concho River Review, I-70 Review, San Pedro River Review, and Rabid Oak. Ken lives in Dearborn, Michigan.

MykytaRyzhykh

Rainer-rain kunze's garden is uprooted inside us

Every time I buy a bottle of cola in the store

Reluctantly you draw a mink in which the weeping morpheme hyacinth hides

The cold of the leaves in the dark forest becomes crunchy

The chill of the leaves in the dark forest becomes christ

Absolute evil under the boot

Crunch under the boot

Or crunch from the inside?

Mykyta Ryzhykh lives in Ukraine and was a finalist of the Crimean ginger competition and Pushcart Nominee (Tipton Poetry Journal). Mykyta has been published in the journals White Mammoth, Soloneba, Litсentr, 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, Acorn haiku Journal, Book of Matches, Ice Floe Press and Literary Chernihiv.

Reassurance to My Future Spouse

D.R.James

You may not know me yet, but I’m learning just who you must be, trusting you’re getting ready for the rest of our lives.

Perhaps you’re already emptying several mental drawers, clearing psychic spaces for another razor, another coffee cup, disrobing the slender shoulders of a dozen wooden hangers in the scented closet of your subtle heart.

Don’t worry, I’m not voyeuristic not strictly speaking anyway though I have been watching your comings and goings goings, mostly in the sector labeled maybe in my mind. And you’ve surely bided your sweet time, perhaps sometimes willingly, or as unwillingly as I, waiting for the grip on our two fates— on our two lines of blind perspective to converge at that distant but critical point where we collide, and teeter, then tip over an imagined ledge, falling, finally, hopelessly into love. Meanwhile,

I’m enjoying the way the wind will want to splay stray strands of hair across your face as you pose for a corny photo by a springtime pond, and how the waves of your dear body, the surf of your complicated soul, will form and conform to the shores of mine and how this will work just as perfectly the other way around.

[This poem was first published in the author’s A Little Instability without Birds (Finishing Line Press, 2006)]

Recently retired from nearly 40 years of teaching college writing, literature, and peace studies, D. R. James lives, writes, bird-watches, and cycles with his psychotherapist wife in the woods near Saugatuck, Michigan. His latest of ten collections are Mobius Trip and Flip Requiem (Dos Madres Press, 2021, 2020), and his prose and poems have appeared internationally in a wide variety of print and online anthologies and journals.

Acquiring Wealth GilHoy

You’ll need to own stocks. Look for stocks with good earnings potential and low PE ratios.

Cuba was first colonized by Spain. Its slave-based plantations produced sugar cane for economic growth. It was later under US influence until becoming a republic. Cuba’s minimum monthly wage is 225 Cuban pesos, about $9 US.

You'll need to own bonds. Choose bonds with high credit ratings. Diversify by picking bonds of different duration.

Tanzania is the largest country in East Africa. Its minimum monthly wage is 40,000 Tanzanian shillings, about $17 US. Tanzania is a distribution center for men, women and children exploited for forced labor and sex.

Then there’s commercial real estate and residential rental properties. Put little or no money down. Leverage is key.

Mexico’s daily minimum wage is 123 pesos, about $6 US. Anti-migrant policies and the militarization of the US-Mexico border have caused an increasing low-wages labor force in northern Mexico border cities.

Own precious metals. For inflation protection. And keep some of your assets in cash. To ride out economic storms.

Did you know the 15 wealthiest individuals in the world have more wealth than the poorest 85 countries combined?

If you start early, and invest wisely, you can be a millionaire when you’re still in your 30s.

Then you can buy a villa on the ocean, in a poor country, with 5 full-time servants. They can live in the guest house. Be sure to treat them kindly.

Gil Hoy is a Best of the Net nominated Tucson, Arizona poet and writer who studied fiction and poetry at Boston University through its Evergreen program and The Writers Studio in Tucson, Arizona. Hoy previously received a B.A. in Philosophy from Boston University, an M.A. in Government from Georgetown University, and a J.D. from the University of Virginia School of Law. Hoy is a semi-retired trial lawyer. His poetry and fiction have previously appeared in Bewildering Stories, Literally Stories, Tipton Poetry Journal, Unlikely Stories Mark V, Chiron Review, The Galway Review, Right Hand Pointing, Rusty Truck, Mobius: The Journal of Social Change, The New Verse News, The Penmen Review, Last Stanza Poetry Journal and elsewhere.

Important Things PaulIlechko

We have a habit of assigning importance to the wrong things the cost of gasoline or mortgage interest rates instead of the joy on the face of a child when she leaps into a pile of leaves there’s a man in a baseball cap kneeling next to his truck slipping his wrench onto the lug nuts as your mind drifts into consideration of the mysterious patterns of alloy wheels and how they map to the socio-cultural symbolism that drives the vehicle market it’s looking likely to snow sometime soon the air has that purplish heaviness so I guess I will have to admit that you made the right call in moving the salt bucket to the porch everyone is in the street with their dogs it’s the wrong time of year for them be in heat even if any of them are still unspayed people disappear behind closed doors as others appear a constant rotation watched over by the mighty pine trees on the corner lot if they are ever to burn they will crackle and smoke so thick with resin but they will likely fall in a high wind before that happens leaving behind a space for newer growth.

Paul Ilechko is British American poet and occasional songwriter who lives with his partner in Lambertville, New Jersey. His work has appeared in many journals, including The Night Heron Barks, Tampa Review, Iron Horse Literary Review, Sleet Magazine, and The Inflectionist Review. He has also published several chapbooks.

Badlands

Mary HillsKuck

Wilderness yawns down walls like toothless gums striated rose, tan, black whipped white trees dangle from the sides. A river slithers through the chasm, its banks scaled with green, to wear bottom rock away as surely as wind erodes the cliffs.

See how the majesty of desolation, the abyss of loneliness, seduce. Resist.

Mary Hills Kuck has spent most of her adult life in the US Northeast and in Jamaica, West Indies. Since retiring from teaching German, English and ESL, she has settled in Massachusetts with her husband and family. She has published poems in print journals, including the Connecticut River Review, SLANT, Tipton Poetry Journal, Burningword Literary Journal, From the Depths, Poetry Quarterly, Main Sreet Rag, and others online. Intermittent Sacraments, her chapbook, was published in 2021 by Finishing Line Press. She has received a Pushcart Prize nomination.

She Herself is a Haunted House MichaelStrosahl

(Title line is borrowed from ! The Lady of the House of Love” by Angela Carter)

Girlish giggles cut to silence as slippers scuff down the hallway Grandma shuffling through her soles, hands brushing along the wall for stead, quietly past the toddler ’s room, shushing toward the whispered chatter of overnight teens feigning slumber before silent desperation quickens her pace again toward the necessary.

Grandpap shouts for his paper, reading from his naive granddaughter ’s face the headlines delivered, tossed against the doorstep, chastising the flirt he saw as she paid the boy, a dollar and a whole dime for tip, a smile too much on her lips as he turned from the stoop, lifting his bike and bag, kicking his leg over, then racing down the lane and up to the neighbors, loudly knocking on their metal storm to make his weekly collection while her eyes kept following, stone deaf to Grandpap ’s call.

Father often softened the flowing saline, tears caught on the end of her nose wiped away in his kerchief, the one she kept hidden long after his sudden passing, pulling it out to bring him back, a balance for Momma ’s harsh hand,

her scolding tongue, the wooden spoon split by a spanking but still useful in stir.

Brother Timmy in diapers, crawling, stumbling, building up his Legos, smashing them with Hot Wheels, running down the stairs, crashing through the door, turning the key and burning tires down the road, racing off to a war that never gave him back a decorated suit offering condolences, unfulfilled promises and a folded flag for the mantle where it rested next to the message carved with his very first knife: “Tim was here.”

The house was eventually sold, the nothing town escaped many years ago, yet these ghosts have followed, the spirits still haunting, shuffling her soul with the dreams of a life once ahead, before newspapers opened with undiscovered dread, the paperboy ran off with the prom queen and she was left behind to cry.

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.

Discovering What to Say WallySwist

for Father Gabriel Rochelle

You write informing me that you have traced your German surname back to 1100 in Blaubeuren and to two brothers who lived auf die riede, or “by the swamp (reeds).” How much like you to provide the exegesis and the argument at once, igniting my memory of our once-a-week Monday talks in your book-lined study facing High Street, the tops of the heads of passersby moving to and from classes at the university, when sometimes the very air itself would fill with the intensity of our conversations, the books

I would bring, the authors I would introduce from my hours working in the bookstore, and you sharing the depth of your knowledge and your active wisdom such as how people forty thousand year ago fashioned bone pipes in the caves near Blaubeuren, how these pipes were both discovered and their images reproduced in paintings on the walls, how you facilitate my hearing the melodies of their playing

not because they have nothing to say but exactly because you and I will always discover what to say and what is most specific to express like the fires of an idea that can even light up the walls of a cave, just like that evening I dropped off a Christmas gift to you of a copy of David Jones’ In Parenthesis, his book-length poem of fighting in the trenches in World War I, the snow falling as slowly as in a paperweight, and you meeting me at the front door, the hallway lit behind you, intimating the length of the decades we would remain in contact and in friendship, wherein there have been silences that are always filled again with words we needed to say and said them

with clarity, not unlike the residents of caves who sat beside the flames of their hearth and blew into their pipes of bone by discovering what they had to say, as we have been trying to leave a trace of the sacred, so anyone could clearly see it and begin to listen to it fill the air.

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 (Wales). He lives in Massachusetts.

The Captain of Neverland LisaPark

You had the hubris of a middle-aged man, skin leathered by experiences, hair thinned by cortisol, abdomen rotundthe captain of the pediatric ICU.

Criss-crossed scars from when you battled Captain Hook’s ticking alligator, each surgery earned a scar, each complication more bragging rights, another chapter added to your epic tale.

A green medical student and graying specialist new to your ship, tried that sing-song baby talk and were thrown overboard with the salty language of a pirate.

One night we headed together into dark choppy waters, subdued by the churning sea, you become a four-year-old girl again, arms puffy with seawater, lifelines thrown into the waves, chest so small for CPR.

I was never so happy to see a red sky in the morning but your swagger was lost at sea.

Lisa Park is an adolescent medicine physician, former college health director and gun violence prevention advocate. She has poetry published or forthcoming in Gyroscope Review, Little Patuxent Review, and the Healing Muse. She has nonfiction forthcoming in Months to Years. Lisa lives in Fairfax, Virginia.

Freudian Slip KenCraft

In response to Freud and his obsession with our obsessions, cultural anthropologist

Ernest Becker wrote, “Consciousness of death is the primary repression, not sexuality.”

My brother never had a chance because man’s primary phobia overtook him while he was still reading up on Freud: exploring caves, opening boxes, eating pears, and dreaming under the influence of his own immortality.

[This poem was first published in Ken Craft’s Reincarnation & Other Stimulants: Life, Death, & In-Between Poems (Kelsay Books, 2021)]

Ken Craft lives in Maine and is the author of three poetry collections: Reincarnation & Other Stimulants, Lost Sherpa of Happiness, and The Indifferent World. His poems have appeared in The Writer's Almanac, Gray's Sporting Journal, South Florida Poetry Journal, The Pedestal, Spillway, and many other journals and e-zines.

Riverside Ghazal PatriciaClark

Most watery of all the trees, these willows stand in water. Ice pools around the ankles of willows.

A tree’s name should reveal its nature. Salix babylonica: the first word is for willow.

Doesn’t it sound stretchy and pliable? Babylonica is for the weeping part of willow.

From a quotation in Psalms: by the rivers of Babylon we wept. The people hung harps on willows.

The weight gave them a bent, permanent shape. A girl flings her hair down, a young willow.

A golden color, like a shout, all the length of the fronds. They light up the willow.

Nearby on the concrete ramp, an ice-filled boat waits for the sun to unmoor it, sail it past the willows.

In the season of thaw, this ice giving way. By the rivers of America, we wept these willows.

[This poem first appeared in The Atlantic, then in My Father on a Bicycle (Mich St. Univ. Press, 2005)]

Fifty-Fifty PatriciaClark

You can have the grackle whistling blackly from the feeder as it tosses seed,

if I can have the red-tailed hawk perched imperious as an eagle on the high branch.

You can have the brown shed, the field mice hiding under the mower, the wasp’s nest on the door,

if I can have the house of the dead oak, its hollowed center and feather-lined cave.

You can have the deck at midnight, the possum vacuuming the yard in its white prowl,

if I can have the yard of wild dreaming, pesky raccoons, and the roaming, occasional bear.

You can have the whole house, window to window, roof to soffits to hardwood floors,

if I can have the screened porch at dawn, the Milky Way, any comets in our yard.

[This poem first appeared in She Walks into the Sea (Mich St. Univ. Press, 2009)]

Patricia Clark is the author six books of poetry, most recently Self-Portrait with a Million Dollars. She's been the recipient of a Michigan Artist Grant, the Mississippi Review Poetry Prize, a co-winner of the Lucille Medwick Prize from the Poetry Society of America and other awards. She taught creative writing and other courses at Grand Valley State University in Michigan until retiring in 2020 after 30 years of teaching. She was the university poet in residence and the Grand Rapids Poet Laureate from 2005-2007. She has work forthcoming in Plume, Cimarron Review, The Southern Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, and North American Review and her poem “Astronomy in Perfect Silence,” which gives a nod to American poet Walt Whitman, was recently chosen to go to the moon as part of the Lunar Codex.

Coming Home MeganWildhood

Dad startled and muttered “I never said I saw combat” at random times my whole life.

His dysfunction got bad enough that I had to start doing the grocery shopping when I was nine.

Before entering the house after school, I’d wait with my brother at the end of the block for a text from mom with instructions

for which way is safe to come home through. When we didn’t get a text, we took turns pressing our ears to all the doors

and windows around the house even though we knew what we’d hear no matter how fervent our prayers

for the fighting to end.

I left for college as soon as I could; Dad started calling the next day, it seemed.

There was space only for me to listen. It took me decades to think to ask my brother if he got calls, too.

Yes. Same stories? Yes. Most of them make only symbolic sense. We couldn’t decide if we were worried enough

to tell Mom or maybe just come home. We didn’t have to. He died “in his sleep” when I was 24. He would never say he saw combat.

If the Brain Were a Tree MeganWildhood

Its trunk would be the lifelong negotiation with gravity, wind, and weakness.

Its roots would be movement and pause, color and shape, song and breath, scent and air, hug and leap, rest and play. Its language would be secret, confounding chemicals and its crown would be the mind, its foliage dreams.

Water for it would be support or cage, depending on amount. Its soil would be thoughts; thus, take every one captive.

Trees are universally loved in theory. The brain, any owner of one will tell you

not so much. The brain could thus not be just any tree. Each is the personal hell of The Tree of the Knowledge

of Good and Evil with its parts both deep and developed ever warring to bear the fruits only found on the Tree of Life.

Megan Wildhood is a writer, editor and writing coach who helps her readers feel seen in her monthly newsletter, poetry chapbook Long Division (Finishing Line Press, 2017), her forthcoming poetry collection Bowed As If Laden With Snow (Cornerstone Press, May 2023) as well as Mad in America, The Sun and elsewhere. You can learn more about her writing, working with her and her mental-health and research newsletter at meganwildhood.com

Happiness JohnGrey

When last seen it was behind the wheel of a Camaro and headed west on the Mass Pike in the direction of Stockbridge.

Despite the guarantees of the Declaration of Independence, I did not pursue, as my car was in the garage and, on foot, I had no chance of catching up with it.

So I stayed home, hoping that happiness would call when it got where it was going, or send an email, or a postcard, or write a letter.

I even prayed that, when happiness reached its destination, it would suddenly realize that it was no longer happy, and turn around, pursue me for a change.

Such a step is guaranteed by my Declaration of Co-Dependence.

John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident now living in Rhode Island, recently published in Sheepshead Review, Stand, Washington Square Review and Floyd County Moonshine. Latest books, Covert, Memory Outside The Head, and Guest Of Myself are available through Amazon. Work upcoming in the McNeese Review, Rathalla Review and Open Ceilings.

White Fire

LynnGilbert

In chill Midwestern woodlands, toward high spring, after skunk cabbages and trilliums have pushed through debris of preceding seasons; when near-dry creeks have pretty well refilled

but grey mists still doze late in the ravines and blacktop roads shine dully under thin rains, then white of dogwood flares in the somber groves like lighted windows stair-stepped up night slopes.

Each wet branch, black with scarcely a touch of green, supports a wafted streamer of white fire borne through the damp and earth-mold smelling air as if on hidden thread. Woods, so seen,

blaze with the startling glory of new hope; and yet these four-bract blooms might be dismissed as commonplace like orchard pear or apple, pleasing en masse, but merely picturesque

if not for the marks of rust at each white tip like laundered bloodstains, and the fluted curl of white around each stain, as if to grip these almost-circles left by ghostly nails.

Lynn Gilbert has had poems in Blue Unicorn, Concho River Review, Exquisite Corpse, Gnu, The Huron River Review, Kansas Quarterly, Light, Mezzo Cammin, Mortar, Peninsula Poets, and elsewhere. An associate editor at Third Wednesday journal, she has been a finalist in the Gerald Cable Book Award (2021) and Off the Grid Press book contests. Lynn lives in Texas.

Falling Out of Bed as a Kid RobertEstes

Only a very few times

Funny feeling to wake up In the dark on the floor

Oh! climb back into bed

I imagine dying is similar

But is there a bed?

Will the sun come up?

Evening Prayer RobertEstes

YOLO FOMO

Mayday!

Mayday!

Robert Estes, who lives in Somerville, Massachusetts, got his PhD in Physics at UC Berkeley and had some interesting times doing physics, notably on a couple of US-Italian Space Shuttle missions. His poems have recently appeared in Cola Literary Review, The Moth, Gargoyle, The Main Street Rag, Third Wednesday, Evening Street Review, SLANT, Blue Unicorn, and the anthology Moving Images: Poetry Inspired by Cinema.

Planting Flowers

MichaelT.Young

My wife and I repopulate the yard with columbine, lamb’s ear, allium these diffusers of beauty and pollen. It’s our way of grasping for their summer dresses, but we slip through their aromas as they spread in a suggestion of omnipresence, a spiriting between them and us of nano angels living the life of sparks, or what they’re mistaken for, flashing and fizzling out between our ribs and every desire that burns there.

Like those early months of our sprouting life together, they soar in what seems an infinite number of choices heavens that include optional days of cloud and rain, badgers rustling the bushes where the yard ends, ants and beetles churning the clumped soil. But reaching toward the sunlight collapses the possible directions, narrowing the avenues but bringing us closer together. And when the day resolves into a night dashed by fireflies, we slump onto the sofa, the exhaustion softening our bodies, while I lean in to hold my wife’s hand, and remind her that all the maps pointed to this moment.

Michael T. Young lives in Jersey City, New Jersey. His third full-length collection, The Infinite Doctrine of Water, was longlisted for the Julie Suk Award. Previous collections are The Beautiful Moment of Being Lost and Transcriptions of Daylight. He is the recipient of a Fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, and the Jean Pedrick Chapbook Award for his chapbook, Living in the Counterpoint. Poetry has been featured on Verse Daily and The Writer’s Almanac. It has also appeared in numerous journals including Banyon Review, Pinyon, Talking River Review, and Valparaiso Poetry Review.

Suspension

AnnBoaden

I watched an outdoor Lear

One Midwest summer

When lightning tickled the dark above the stage And snares of thunder seconded the old king’s fury. How nature and art conspired to define Our fierce and ineffectual humanity, until One long bolt cracked the cheeks of sky And stopped the show. The actors

Melted off in silence, all passionate intensity Stilled; left fire and wind and flood

To drum the empty boards and scour the night, Till only shining dribbles showed Where Shakespeare once had been. It was a shock, this unsuspension

Of disbelief, as if

That final dazzling crooked blade Had severed something vital, Some artery between What is and what can be, And we, anemic ghosts, sent drifting Bewildered between real and real.

Ann Boaden’s work has appeared in various journals including Another Chicago Magazine, Big Muddy, From SAC, Ginosko, Gingerbread House, The Penwood Review, Sediments, South Dakota Review, Tipton Poetry Journal, The Windhover, The Other Journal, Persimmon Tree and others. A midwest native, she received her master's and doctoral degrees from The University of Chicago before returning to teach at her undergraduate college, Augustana in Illinois.

Cracking Ice ElizabethHill

From my mother, I inherited the habit of chewing ice and a love of organizing the unruly. As we sit in her study, she calls person after person, dunning them to attend her organization’s poetry reading. Would you like to come? Pick up the phone and agree to be there on Wednesday the 30th at 7. Ask your friends to come too. There will be coffee and donuts and a chance to meet the poets. She has more success than me, as I strive to assemble the words of a poem that just won’t cohere. I watch as she recruits the poets for the “Poetry Hoot”, asking the Portsmouth Poet Laurate of 2003 to help.

Organizing people is easier than corralling rowdy words. People come together without any need for rhyme, meter, enjambments, or profundity. Her results seem amorphous, yet her goals consume her as she drives ahead. See her put down the phone, type, stare at the screen, take ice from a mug and gnash a cube with her teeth. The cracking has a report like a small bullet.

She is riveted by the schedule, which begins to sing. Now watch her plan her own funeral, assemble her four children and five grandchildren, and compel my father to carry on, alone.

Elizabeth Hill has been published in Rattle, 34th Parallel Magazine, Blue Lake Review, Last Stanza Poetry Journal, and I-70 Review, among other journals. She has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and was a Finalist in the 2022 Rattle Poetry Contest, with her poem also appearing as Poem of the Day on February 20, 2023. She is a retired Administrative Law Judge responsible for suits between learning disabled children and the school system. Elizabeth lives in Harlem, New York City, with her husband and two irascible cats.

Breaking Open

CharleneLangfur

I see how the flowers do it. petal by petal, intricately, and with utter ease at the same time, under the sun, completely alive. Opening the same way the light rises and the mountains open up from out under the clouds and the moon, a sliver of yellow in the sky showing up as if from out of nowhere, and I see what I knew was there but did not look long enough or deeply enough until I knew what I had to do in order to be me again, change until I worked again even now in the pandemic world of earth changes and high-tech everything, and I knew there was more to it, a longer walk at first light with my dog leaping in the grass, more seeds to plant in the old clay pots out front, sweet peas and sunflowers. Can’t you see them? A woman with more time to love, all in, all breaking open the way I did once, a woman loving another, one petal at a time , light rising, as easy as that.

Charlene Langfur lives in Palm Springs, California, and is a southern Californian, an organic gardener, a Syracuse University Graduate Writing Fellow. Her poems have appeared in Poetry East, Room, Weber, and most recently in North Dakota Quarterly and The Healing Muse.

The Body Broken

NancyPulley

Each day, the mind wraps a bandage around past wounds, the spirit rises up to eat pain and the body just tries not to remember. All that has been sewn together tears from the stretching, from the using, the living and has to relearn healing. You tell yourself the surgeons’ knife has freed a part of you that will never be slave to skin again. Yet there is still the finger missing, the breast, the leg, a piece of you that once was. Time and again you modify how to see yourself as whole.

Nancy Pulley has published poems in Tipton Poetry Journal, the Indiannual, The Flying Island, Arts Indiana Literary Supplement, Passages North, Plainsong, The Sycamore Review, and the Humpback Barn Festival collection. In 1992, Nancy won the Indiana Writer’s Center Poetry Chapbook contest, resulting in the publication of Tremolo of Light. She lives in Columbus, Indiana.

The Fires

LeahStenson

Ash isn’t falling here yet and the sky isn’t fiery red, but across the field, cottonwoods, pale phantoms shrouded in smoke, signal a warning.

As I look east at a dull pink disk in a chalk-gray sky, confusion gives way to understanding. I’m staring at the naked sun, monarch of the sky.

Like so many souls in this state, I repent not being ready, no time to consider how to leave, what to take.

Leah Stenson is the author of two chapbooks Heavenly Body (2011) and The Turquoise Bee and Other Love Poems (2014), a full-length book of poetry Everywhere I find Myself (2017), and a hybrid memoir Life Revised (2020). She served as a regional editor of Alive at the Center: Contemporary Poems from the Pacific Northwest (2013), co-editor of Reverberations from Fukushima: 50 Japanese Poets Speak Out (2014) and editor of the second edition of Reverberations… (2021). She hosts the monthly Studio Series Poetry Reading & Open Mic in Portland, Oregon.

A Meteor in Space

BruceLevine

Floating through time

Like a meteor floating in space

Propelled by gravity

Pulled without free will

Or choice of direction

Lost in circumstances of fate

Held in the hand of the unknown

Between light and dark

Amidst shades of gray

That no longer offer resolution

Roadblocks sprinkled in the sand

Like pepper ground from a mill

Wasted days filled with detritus

Consuming hours like confetti

Swept away after a parade

Focus colliding with infertility

As kaleidoscopic entities

Fracture like prisms of light

Radiating toward infinity

On a path of its own making

Leaving the source suspended

In a vacuum of virtual reality

Time floating in a continuum

Racing through a valley without end

Yet ever scaling the mountains

Evading falling rocks

Hoping to reach the summit

In a fantasy held by a thread

Dangling on the precipice of fate

Or dashed against the shore

Of a rock-bound coast

To splinter again and again

Like the hull of a sunken ship

Driftwood deposited on a sandy beach

Waiting to become a sculpture

And yet knowing its own futility

As the surf tears at its fibers

The sinews of its being

Torn into tiny pieces

To drift like a meteor in space

Bruce Levine has spent his life as a writer of fiction and poetry and as a music and theatre professional. A 2019 Pushcart Prize Poetry nominee, a 2021 Spillwords Press Awards winner, the Featured Writer in WestWard Quarterly Summer 2021 and his bio is featured in “Who’s Who of Emerging Writers 2020.” Bruce has over three hundred works published on over twentyfive on-line journals including Ariel Chart, Spillwords, The Drabble; in over seventy print books including Poetry Quarterly, Haiku Journal, Tipton Poetry Journal; Halcyon Days Founder’s Favourites (on-line and print) and his shows have been produced in New York and around the country. His work is dedicated to the loving memory of his late wife, Lydia Franklin. A native Manhattanite, Bruce now lives and writes in Maine. Visit him at www.brucelevine.com

Review: No Lunch Among the Day Stars by Jeanine Stevens

ReviewedbyBarryHarris

Title: No Lunch Among the Day Stars

Author: Jeanine Stevens

Year: 2022

Publisher: Cold River Press

In case you were wondering about the title of “No Lunch Among the Day Stars,” so was I. At first I was puzzled. Then as I read through the poems in Jeanine Stevens’ latest book, I was troubled when I couldn’t find a clue to explain the title. Thinking it might be some new slang I wasn’t familiar with, I consulted the Google oracle. Nothing. Perhaps it was a familiar line from a poet I hadn’t read. Then, on page 50, I found it perched on a top branch inside the poem “Wind Chimes With Birds”:

Through the skylight, high in our redwood spindly and dark with age yet fragrant, our occasional hawk in topmost boughs, usually facing west, today, searches north…

With my field glasses I follow his gaze: “What is he seeking; no lunch among the day stars?”

The full moon leaves a tinge of sun.

So there it is. A hawk at the top of a redwood tree on a, so far, unsuccessful hunt for food at twilight, which is when you can see day stars. Now that you know that, let’s talk about the book.

Jeanine Stevens is a master of poetic observation of detail, whether she is revealing a work of art in one of her many ekphrastic poems or describing ordinary details on a sauntering walk that begins her poem “Homestead.” In a few lines we are left with breadcrumbs of dissimilar symbols of home: “a key on a string placed on a stone,” the word “Smile” written in sidewalk chalk on a driveway, a tortoise killed along the roadside (“how cruel to attack someone’s dwelling place”), the White House, the sound of the chime of a grandfather clock. Then there is her attention to detail: an old hippie guy who considerately calls out “Hi Darlin” to not startle her on her walk and the distinct sound of a brittle Sycamore leaf cartwheeling in a breeze.

It is interesting, when reading Stevens’ poetry, to take a side trip through the sources of her ekphrastic poems. In “Stepping Out,” she explores the details in Roy Lichtenstein’s painting, bringing to life a “jaunty yachtsman, / his face a playing card” and his companion who

… walks ahead, long jaw of a mature woman, hair a swatch of Veronica Lake swirl over red-orange cheeks

She wonders for us about their motivations.

She seems ticked off; maybe he dressed in her favorite colors? Perhaps her protégée, love match, or just a lousy date? The angrier she becomes, one large cyclops eye hangs vertically from her bone white forehead.

After I read those closing lines from “Stepping Out,” I naturally had to locate a copy of Lichtenstein’s pop art painting and can confirm that “one large cyclops eye” does just that.

In “Objet D’Art,” Stevens pursues the art of ekphrasis by itemizing and pondering the contents of Andy Warhol’s shopping cart in Bob Adelman’s photograph: “Andy Warhol in Gristede’s Supermarket.”

Surveying the lineup: split pea, clam chowder, chili beef and black bean, it’s the label that interest him, red as tangy catsup white as creamy potato.

Bending down, he selects those that say “Pick me.” Hungry, he will purchse two of each, he loves soup one to eat, the other as an icon of history, salt and modern invention.

If you can believe a poet’s own words, Jeanine’s childhood is presented as immersing herself in the comforts of reading, daydreaming and following the elixir of nature. She describes herself as a girl who says “On my childhood ceiling, how lucky: / glow in the dark orbits and planets” in her poem “Nebula,” which is also reflected in the choice of cover photo for No Lunch Among the Day Stars a photograph of the Horse Head Nebula which she locates for us:

Sapphire mist under Orion’s belt, I know where I’m going Horse Head Nebula climbing

his thick neck, rich mahogany embedded in delicate draperies of pink gas…

My memories not a black hole: my nebula still lit by neighboring stars.

In ‘Dean’s List,” Jeanine Stevens describes how she would proactively have her answer prepared for Shakespeare class so she could gaze out the second story window.

I read everything three times; made the list.

Go outside, wander alone, seek singing bugs, ignore signposts; write that poem!

Jeanine Stevens, who lives in Northern California, doesn’t let us forget that the nature she is in love with, while endangered, is also a source of hope. In “It’s the Snow That Makes the Mountain,” she tells us how for the first time in recorded history that Mount Shasta is devoid of snow but in “Violets and Smoke,” she leaves us with a sense of hope and the resilience of nature.

We no longer have a “fire season” but an all year event. The stench hangs; this greyness resembles ghostly veils.

From a drone, sparks resemble panels of pulsating red stars. The sun, when visible, glares like an angry dahlia

Violets shrouded with smoke and flames, may blister, scorch, wither. But, there is power in undercurrents that travel acres away.

Jeanine Stevens is the author of Limberlost and Inheritor (Future Cycle Press), Her first poetry collection, Sailing on Milkweed, was published by Cherry Grove Collections. Her most recent book is “No Lunch Among the Day Stars.”

She is winner of the MacGuffin Poet Hunt, the William Stafford Award, The Stockton Arts Commission Award, The Ekphrasis Prize, and WOMR Cape Cod Community Radio National Poetry Award. Brief Immensity, won the Finishing Line Press Open Chapbook Award. Gertrude Sitting: Portraits of Women, won The Heartland Review 2020 Chapbook Prize. She participated in Literary Lectures Celtic Symbolism, sponsored by Poets and Writers. Work has appeared in North Dakota Review, Evansville Review, The Kerf, Stoneboat, Rosebud, Chiron Review and Tipton Poetry Journal.

Jeanine studied poetry at U.C. Davis, earned her M.A. at CSU Sacramento, and has a doctorate in Education. She is also a collage artist and has exhibited her work in various art galleries. Jeanine is Professor Emerita at American River College. Raised in Indiana, she now divides her time between Sacramento and Lake Tahoe.

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.

Review: Daybreak and Deep by Jessica D. Thompson

ReviewedbyJoyceBrinkman

Title: Daybreak and Deep

Author: Jessica D. Thompson

Year: 2022

Publisher: Kelsay Books

When Jessica Thompson emailed me asking if she could send me a copy of her new book, of course, I said yes. Jessica has had poetry published by this journal in the past and she has written for one of our Arts In The Park programs. I remembered those poems fondly and thought I might find one or two poems there to use as a Natural Moment Poem on our podcast "Off the Bricks."

As I flipped through the book things didn't look promising. Most of her poems filled at least a page. Too long for the Natural Moment segment. A bit disappointed but not quite ready for sleep, I thought I should just sample the book anyway and began reading on the first page. I get to read a lot of poetry books and I seldom like every poem in the book. I didn't expect to read too far, but instead, I read the whole book and most of the poems more than once.

I've also gone back to the book since then. It is not because she amazes you with a variety of forms and poetry styles. You don't go back several times because they continually reveal something new each time you reread them. They don't pose hidden surprises that take several readings to uncover. Still, it's hard to grow tired of a Jessica Thompson poem.

Even though at least half of these poems were published somewhere else first, as they come together in this book they all speak the same language. While they dazzle they don't leave you confused. They bring a sense of

satisfaction that you understand the poem fully and instead of a different insight, you are met with the same sense of comfort you gained on your, first read. You appreciate her poems as well-constructed poems that lure you with their plain beauty and approach. They touch you again and again. They leave you satisfied and happy to know you can regain that same satisfaction on future reads.

It's very hard for me to pick a favorite out of the book. I could spend a lot of time arguing with myself over such a task. My favorite will usually be found on whatever page I happen to be reading at the time. The book begins with its title poem and it immediately impressed me.

Daybreak and Deep

where pines are but a dark blur, the barred owls

are at it again declaring Godknows what,

past the goneto-weeds garden.

I sit facing east before making the bed.

The smell of my pillow like sunlight and old books.

The shape of my head still visible there.

(This rings true. I'm always wondering what animals are declaring)

(The only kind I ever have)

The same happenstance way that pasture grass lays after deer abandon sleep. (My favorite part of this poem)

Overnight, the trees dropped

their pine cones. This morning,

I pulled more strands of hair from my brush.

It happens every year school buses

bumping down the road, the slowing churn of crickets, arrival of crows in corn stubble.

(How can you not love a poem with crows?) The sound of leaves

trembling like tambourines in trees.

(The ending crescendo with tambourines!)

After reading this I was impressed with her selection of her best poem as her opening one, but then I discovered good as it was there were many other equally good choices. Each poem somehow calls to the poet and now the reader to follow the meaning of the Rumi quote in the book's opening to wake up to life amid all its machinations.

Let me leave you with her equally good choice for a closing poem knowing that encased between them are pages of the same quality poems that charm, comfort and challenge us all to live awake.

Tall Grass

In the history of the Great Plains, women went insane with prairie madness the incessant wind, the never-ending grief of grass. But I have learned to sleep

in meadows where fireflies lay eggs then die, and the wind blows through the tall grass of my body.

My limbs are made of crowfoot, backbone foxtail millet.

My hair one long braid of curly dock. Sedge grass takes root in the marrow

of my bones, and my breasts weep with the sap of milkweed.

On the day the earth takes me back, my spirit will rise like the wild

cane that grows on the banks of a narrow stream.

Jessica D. Thompson’s poetry has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has been published in numerous journals, including Appalachian Review, Atlanta Review, Still: The Journal, Tiferet Journal, The Midwest Quarterly, and The Southern Review.

Her work has also appeared in many anthologies, among them: Women Speak, Vol 7 (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions); Circe’s Lament: the Anthology of Wild Women Poetry (Accents Publishing); and Next Indiana Campfires: a Trail Companion (Indiana Humanities). She was a finalist in the 2022 Joy Bale Boone Poetry Prize (The Heartland Review) and in the Betty Gabehart Prize in Poetry (Kentucky Women Writers, 2016).

Her first full-length poetry collection, Daybreak and Deep, was published in the fall of 2022 by Kelsay Books and was named a finalist in the American Book Fest Best Books of 2022 for Narrative Poetry. Daybreak and Deep has also been nominated for the 2023 Eric Hoffer Award. Her poem entitled The Grandmother Who Fell from the Sky has been published in The Polaris Trilogy which will be launched in a time capsule aboard the Space X flight scheduled to depart for the South Pole of the Earth’s Moon 2024. Jessica lives in a stone house on the edge of a classified forest in Southern Indiana.

Joyce Brinkman, Indiana Poet Laureate 20022008, believes in poetry as public art. She creates public poetry projects involving her poetry and the poetry of others. Collaborations with visual artists using her poetry for permanent installations include her words in a twenty- five foot stained glass window by British glass artist Martin Donlin at the Indianapolis International Airport, in lighted glass by Arlon Bayliss at the Indianapolis-Marion County Central Library and on a wall with local El Salvadoran artists in the town square of Quezaltepeque, El Salvador.

Her printed works include two chapbooks, Tiempo Español, and Nine Poems In Form Nine, and two collaborative books, Rivers, Rails and Runways, and Airmail from the Airpoets from San Francisco Bay Press, with fellow airpoets Ruthelen Burns, Joe Heithaus, and Norbert Krapf.

Her latest books include the multinational, multilingual book Seasons of Sharing: A Kasen Renku Collaboration (Leapfrog Press), Urban Voices: 51 Poems from 51 American Poets (San Francisco Bay Press), which she co-edited with Dr. Carolyn Kreiter-,Foronda, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Illuminated by the Message (ACTA Publications) and Catena Poetica An International Collaboration (Finishing Line Press). Joyce organized the collaborative poems for the Indiana Bicentennial Legacy Book Mapping the Muse (Brick Street Poetry). The collaborative poem, Following the Rivers Flow, from that book is scheduled to be sent to the Moon on a NASA flight later this year. She is a graduate of Hanover College. Joyce is a graduate of Hanover College and resides in Zionsville, Indiana, with a cantankerous cat.

Contributor Biographies

Ann Boaden’s work has appeared in various journals including Another Chicago Magazine, Big Muddy, From SAC, Ginosko, Gingerbread House, The Penwood Review, Sediments, South Dakota Review, Tipton Poetry Journal, The Windhover, The Other Journal, Persimmon Tree and others. A midwest native, she received her master's and doctoral degrees from The University of Chicago before returning to teach at her undergraduate college, Augustana in Illinois.

Patricia Clark is the author six books of poetry, most recently Self-Portrait with a Million Dollars. She's been the recipient of a Michigan Artist Grant, the Mississippi Review Poetry Prize, a co-winner of the Lucille Medwick Prize from the Poetry Society of America and other awards. She taught creative writing and other courses at Grand Valley State University in Michigan until retiring in 2020 after 30 years of teaching. She was the university poet in residence and the Grand Rapids Poet Laureate from 2005-2007. She has work forthcoming in Plume, Cimarron Review, The Southern Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, and North American Review and her poem “Astronomy in Perfect Silence,” which gives a nod to American poet Walt Whitman, was recently chosen to go to the moon as part of the Lunar Codex.

Ken Craft lives in Maine and is the author of three poetry collections: Reincarnation & Other Stimulants, Lost Sherpa of Happiness, and The Indifferent World. His poems have appeared in The Writer's Almanac, Gray's Sporting Journal, South Florida Poetry Journal, The Pedestal, Spillway, and many other journals and e-zines.

A nine time Pushcart nominee in both prose and poetry, Liz Dolan has published two poetry collections. Her ten grandchildren pepper her life. Liz lives in Rehobeth Beach,

Robert Estes, who lives in Somerville, Massachusetts, got his PhD in Physics at UC Berkeley and had some interesting times doing physics, notably on a couple of US-Italian Space Shuttle missions. His poems have recently appeared in Cola Literary Review, The Moth, Gargoyle, The Main Street Rag, Third Wednesday, Evening Street Review, SLANT, Blue Unicorn, and the anthology Moving Images: Poetry Inspired by Cinema.

Harold Furr is a retired nutritional biochemist living in the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia, where his lifelong hobby of photography and the mountains occasionally conspire to produce excellent results.

Lynn Gilbert has had poems in Blue Unicorn, Concho River Review, Exquisite Corpse, Gnu, The Huron River Review, Kansas Quarterly, Light, Mezzo Cammin, Mortar, Peninsula Poets, and elsewhere. An associate editor at Third Wednesday journal, she has been a finalist in the Gerald Cable Book Award (2021) and Off the Grid Press book contests. Lynn lives in Texas.

John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident now living in Rhode Island, recently published in Sheepshead Review, Stand, Washington Square Review and Floyd County Moonshine. Latest books, Covert, Memory Outside The Head, and Guest Of Myself are available through Amazon. Work upcoming in the McNeese Review, Rathalla Review and Open Ceilings.

Elizabeth Hill has been published in 34th Parallel Magazine, Blue Lake Review, Last Stanza Poetry Journal, and I-70 Review, among other journals. She has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and was a Finalist in the 2022 Rattle Poetry Contest, with her poem also appearing as Poem of the Day on February 20, 2023. She is a retired Administrative Law Judge responsible for suits between learning disabled children and the school system. Elizabeth lives in Harlem, New York City, with her husband and two irascible cats.

Gil Hoy is a Best of the Net nominated Tucson, Arizona poet and writer who studied fiction and poetry at Boston University through its Evergreen program and The Writers Studio in Tucson, Arizona. Hoy previously received a B.A. in Philosophy from Boston University, an M.A. in Government from Georgetown University, and a J.D. from the University of Virginia School of Law. Hoy is a semi-retired trial lawyer. His poetry and fiction have previously appeared in Bewildering Stories, Literally Stories, Tipton Poetry Journal, Unlikely Stories Mark V, Chiron Review, The Galway Review, Right Hand Pointing, Rusty Truck, Mobius: The Journal of Social Change, The New Verse News, The Penmen Review, Last Stanza Poetry Journal and elsewhere.

Paul Ilechko is British American poet and occasional songwriter who lives with his partner in Lambertville, New Jersey. His work has appeared in many journals, including The Night Heron Barks, Tampa Review, Iron Horse Literary Review, Sleet Magazine, and The Inflectionist Review. He has also published several chapbooks.

Liz Jacoby lives in southeast Michigan, but her heart is in Southern Illinois. She has work forthcoming in The Vehicle and she has recenty published in Transom.

Recently retired from nearly 40 years of teaching college writing, literature, and peace studies, D. R. James lives, writes, bird-watches, and cycles with his psychotherapist wife in the woods near Saugatuck, Michigan. His latest of ten collections are Mobius Trip and Flip Requiem (Dos Madres Press, 2021, 2020), and his prose and poems have appeared internationally in a wide variety of print and online anthologies and journals.

Siobhan Jean-Charles is an English major at Salisbury University on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. Her work has appeared or will appear in Dark River Review, Furrow, Polaris, Redactions: Poetry and Poetics, The Tusculum Review, and The Shore Poetry, where she is the Social Media Manager.

Mary Hills Kuck has spent most of her adult life in the US Northeast and in Jamaica, West Indies. Since retiring from teaching German, English and ESL, she has settled in Massachusetts with her husband and family. She has published poems in print journals, including the Connecticut River Review, SLANT, Tipton Poetry Journal, Burningword Literary Journal, From the Depths, Poetry Quarterly, Main Sreet Rag, and others online. Intermittent Sacraments, her chapbook, was published in 2021 by Finishing Line Press. She has received a Pushcart Prize nomination.

Charlene Langfur lives in Palm Springs, California, and is a southern Californian, an organic gardener, a Syracuse University Graduate Writing Fellow. Her poems have appeared in Poetry East, Room, Weber, and most recently in North Dakota Quarterly and The Healing Muse.

Bruce Levine has spent his life as a writer of fiction and poetry and as a music and theatre professional. A 2019 Pushcart Prize Poetry nominee, a 2021 Spillwords Press Awards winner, the Featured Writer in WestWard Quarterly Summer 2021 and his bio is featured in “Who’s Who of Emerging Writers 2020.” Bruce has over three hundred works published on over twenty-five on-line journals including Ariel Chart, Spillwords, The Drabble; in over seventy print books including Poetry Quarterly, Haiku Journal, Tipton Poetry Journal; Halcyon Days Founder’s Favourites (on-line and print) and his shows have been produced in New York and around the country. His work is dedicated to the loving memory of his late wife, Lydia Franklin. A native Manhattanite, Bruce now lives and writes in Maine. Visit him at www.brucelevine.com

Poet and filmmaker Dave Malone lives in the Missouri Ozarks. His latest poetry volume is Tornado Drill (Aldrich Press, 2022), and his poems have appeared in Plainsongs, San Pedro River Review, and Delta Poetry Review. He can be found online at davemalone.net or via Instagram @dave.malone.

Ken Meisel is a poet and psychotherapist, a 2012 Kresge Arts Literary Fellow, a Pushcart Prize nominee and the author of eight books of poetry. His most recent books are: Our Common Souls: New & Selected Poems of Detroit (Blue Horse Press: 2020) and Mortal Lullabies (FutureCycle Press: 2018). Meisel has recent work in Concho River Review, I-70 Review, San Pedro River Review, and Rabid Oak. Ken lives in Dearborn, Michigan.

Lisa Park is an adolescent medicine physician, former college health director and gun violence prevention advocate. She has poetry published or forthcoming in Gyroscope Review, Little Patuxent Review, and the Healing Muse. She has nonfiction forthcoming in Months to Years. Lisa lives in Fairfax, Virginia.

Tia Paul-Louis is a fiction writer and poet from Florida. She began experimenting with songwriting at age 11 and later felt a deeper connection to poetry. Her themes portray family life, gender role controversies, mental health, and spiritual values. She admires the freedom of expression in most forms of art such as music, acting, and painting.

A retired teacher of English and photography, Roger Pfingston is the recipient of a poetry fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and two PEN Syndicated Fiction Awards. He has poems in recent issues of I-70 Review, Innisfree Poetry Journal, Salt, The Flying Island, Midwest Review, and Sheila-Na-Gig. His latest chapbook, What’s Given, is available from Kattywompus Press. Roger lives in Bloomington, Indiana.

Nancy Pulley has published poems in Tipton Poetry Journal, the Indiannual, The Flying Island, Arts Indiana Literary Supplement, Passages North, Plainsong, The Sycamore Review, and the Humpback Barn Festival collection. In 1992, Nancy won the Indiana Writer’s Center Poetry Chapbook contest, resulting in the publication of Tremolo of Light. She lives in Columbus, Indiana.

Steven Riel is the author of two full-length collections of poetry: Fellow Odd Fellow and Edgemere. His chapbook Postcard from P-town was published as runner-up for the inaugural Robin Becker Chapbook Prize. His poems have appeared in The Minnesota Review and International Poetry Review. He edits the Franco-American journal Résonance and lives in Massachusetts.

Mykyta Ryzhykh lives in Ukraine and was a finalist of the Crimean ginger competition and Pushcart Nominee (Tipton Poetry Journal). Mykyta has been published in the journals White Mammoth, Soloneba, Litсentr, 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, Acorn haiku Journal, Book of Matches, Ice Floe Press and Literary Chernihiv.

Mary Salisbury’s poetry has been published in Calyx and Michigan Quarterly Review. An Oregon Literary Arts Fellowship recipient, Mary earned her MFA (fiction) from Pacific University. Her fiction has been published in The Whitefish Review and Cutthroat.

Leah Stenson is the author of two chapbooks Heavenly Body (2011) and The Turquoise Bee and Other Love Poems (2014), a full-length book of poetry Everywhere I find Myself (2017), and a hybrid memoir Life Revised (2020). She served as a regional editor of Alive at the Center: Contemporary Poems from the Pacific Northwest (2013), co-editor of Reverberations from Fukushima: 50 Japanese Poets Speak Out (2014) and editor of the second edition of Reverberations… (2021). She hosts the monthly Studio Series Poetry Reading & Open Mic in Portland, Oregon.

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.

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 (Wales). He lives in Massachusetts.

Jim Tilley lives in New York and has published three full-length collections of poetry (In Confidence, Cruising at Sixty to Seventy, Lessons from Summer Camp) and a novel (Against the Wind) with Red Hen Press. His short memoir, The Elegant Solution, was published as a Ploughshares Solo. He has won Sycamore Review’s Wabash Prize for Poetry. Four of his poems have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

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

Carol Tyx lives in Iowa City, where she raises her voice in the community sing movement and supports community-based agriculture. A professor emeritus at Mt. Mercy University, Tyx is the winner of a Willow Run Poetry Book Award for Remaking Achilles: Slicing into Angola’s History. Her work has recently appeared in Poetry East, Big Muddy, and Rising to the Rim (Brick Road Poetry Press). She also makes a phenomenal strawberry rhubarb pie.

Shin Watanabe was born in Gainesville, Florida and has lived in New York, New Jersey, Minnesota, and Nevada. He studied philosophy at the University of Minnesota and received an MFA in poetry at the University of Las Vegas. Shin is currently a PhD candidate in English with a creative dissertation in poetry at Binghamton University. His poetry has appeared previously in the Colorado Review and the I-70 Review.

Diane Webster retired in 2022 after working 40 years at a local newspaper. Her work has appeared in El Portal, North Dakota Quarterly, New English Review and other literary magazines. She also had a micro-chap published by Origami Poetry Press in 2022. A poem of Diane's was nominated for Best of the Net by Star 82 in 2022 as well. She lives in Colorado.

Megan Wildhood is a writer, editor and writing coach living in Seattle who helps her readers feel seen in her monthly newsletter, poetry chapbook Long Division (Finishing Line Press, 2017), her forthcoming poetry collection Bowed As If Laden With Snow (Cornerstone Press, May 2023) as well as Mad in America, The Sun and elsewhere. You can learn more about her writing, working with her and her mental-health and research newsletter at meganwildhood.com.

Avra Wing’s poetry appeared most recently in Constellations, The American Journal of Poetry, The Hollins Critic, and Cimarron Review, and is upcoming in I-70 Review. She is the author of two novels: Angie, I Says, made into the movie, Angie, and After Isaac, for young adults. Avra lives in Brooklyn.

Michael T. Young lives in Jersey City, New Jersey. His third full-length collection, The Infinite Doctrine of Water, was longlisted for the Julie Suk Award. Previous collections are The Beautiful Moment of Being Lost and Transcriptions of Daylight. He is the recipient of a Fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, and the Jean Pedrick Chapbook Award for his chapbook, Living in the Counterpoint. Poetry has been featured on Verse Daily and The Writer’s Almanac. It has also appeared in numerous journals including Banyon Review, Pinyon, Talking River Review, and Valparaiso Poetry Review.

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.