Tipton Poetry Journal #61 - Summer 2024 by Tipton Poetry Journal

Tipton Poetry Journal 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 38 poets from the United States (18 unique states), and 6 poets from Bangladesh, Canada, Czech Republic, Spain, Sri Lanka, and Ukraine.

Our Featured Poem this issue is “Always the Wind” written by Paul Ilechko. His poem, which also receives an award of $25, can be found on page 2. 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 Alessio Zanelli’s The Invisible and Bonnie Maurer’s The Poem on Its Head by the Window.

Cover Photo: Summer’s Shadows by Barry Harris.

Barry Harris, Editor

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.

What Regenerates in Solitude

HollieDugas

In the name of upended romance: like a tiny pinhole, I soak up the cool moonlight until my skin burns red with her icy glow.

In her cold bath, the moon, she keeps me company. I like to think she listens to the quiet sizzling of my life as I follow myself into a boon of unknowing.

The miracle of ritual burrows its roots into my chest. My firefly heart lanterns only a few small steps ahead of me, closing the needless noise that follows me in darkness. Here,

I flip my capsized world upright again, learn the body as a home my collection of experiences gone bottom up.

And how I’ve earned this sweet unfolding, this complete inversion, to be the girl inside the howl, destined to break through resolute and purposeful the way gods do.

Hollie Dugas lives in New Mexico. Her work has been included in Barrow Street, Reed Magazine, Porter House Review, Salamander, Poet Lore, Mud Season Review, The Louisville Review, The Penn Review, Breakwater Review, Third Coast, RHINO, and others. Her poem was selected as winner of the 22nd Annual Lois Cranston Memorial Poetry Prize at CALYX.Recently, Hollie has been nominated for a 2020 Pushcart Prize and for inclusion in Best New Poets 2021. She is currently a member on the editorial board for Off the Coast.

Always the Wind

PaulIlechko

Always it’s the wind doing those things that wind does but don’t say that it howls don’t say that it moans wind is silent motion that stirs the things it touches sometimes making them sing if they have the capability of course the wind will not last calmness is sure to return as earth pulls its arms back into its body and hugs itself tightly the sun lighting up this room heat radiant from warming glass and naturally I hug you too in the intimacy of our privacy the quiet hour between dawn and rising imagining that when we are older we will move to the west-facing porch the sun lost behind the house no wind on such a beautiful morning rocking ourselves peacefully into what remains of our futures while somewhere in the distance we hear the shrieking of a fire truck unless it’s just the wind crying again.

Paul Ilechko is a British American poet and occasional songwriter who lives with his partner in Lambertville, New Jersey. His work has appeared in many journals, including The Bennington Review, The Night Heron Barks, Southword, Permafrost, and Pirene’s Fountain. His first book is scheduled for 2025 publication by Gnashing Teeth Publishing.

Sleight of Hand

RobertL.Penick

Thirteen dollars worth of fish and chips gives me the right to occupy this booth, with its view of cars rolling through the parking lot, for at least an hour, maybe ninety minutes. Across the way the vehicles change in the lot of the immediate care center each time I look over. Sneaky ninja injured parties, I think to myself, while making another list of impossible tasks and frustrated desires.

Connect with the world, I write, Learn to skip, or sing, or fly.

Outside, my Ford sits, all four wheels cemented to the asphalt, and I wonder how long I can keep fooling myself with this same magic trick, making time disappear.

In addition to Tipton Poetry Journal the poetry and prose of Robert L. Penick have appeared in well over 200 different literary publications, including The Hudson Review, North American Review, Plainsongs, and Oxford Magazine. The Art of Mercy: New and Selected Poems is now available from Hohm Press, and more of his work can be found at theartofmercy.net. He lives in Louisville, Kentucky.

Coffee House Portrait #3

GarrettPhelan

The back of the morning edges into his eyes. Who’s the question sitting next to him?

His hair scrapes the curb and his legs made necessary because of traffic signals.

Private eyes.

When he’s angry or bad his hands turn into hiking boots.

What’s his verb?

Out of mouth tumbles rancid language and odd bits of food scrapes.

The question gets up, leaves.

Memory

Garrett Phelan lives In Connecticut and is the author of the chapbook Outlaw Odes (Antrim House) and the micro-chapbooks Unfixed Marks and Standing where I am (Origami Poem Project). His poems have appeared in numerous publications including Harpy Hybrid, Slipstream, Potomac Review, Connecticut River Review, Sheila-Na-Gig, and Third Wednesday. He is a Pushcart Prize nominee.

DonnaPucciani

My earliest memory is talking baby-talk with my twin about our yellow stuffed rabbits, and her “riding” her crib next to mine for nocturnal meetings that would later

panic our parents, finding us in the same crib next morning, chattering away.

Our conversations planted memory in our past like an exotic flower, blooming continually and forever.

When does memory root itself in the soil of childhood, taking hold of the years like an invasive species? And why does it leave us when it does, sometimes far too early, a random casualty of aging?

A friend in England has begun to forget, as if to balance babyhood’s linguistic adventure, the invention of memory, with a gradual senility.

To live in the present is a gift, but unwelcome when one cannot recall a name, a face, the clock striking the hour, or one’s own visage, slowly fading into the wrinkled petals of time.

Donna Pucciani, a Chicago-based writer, has published poetry worldwide in such diverse publications as Shi Chao Poetry Meniscus, Gradiva, Acumen, Voice and Verse and other journals. Her most recent book of poems is Edges.

Visitant

WallySwist

My favorite time is the morning, when I fill the birdbath for the day as I place the galvanized bucket beneath the tap, or if I’m lucky use the rainwater that’s filled it from the previous night’s storm, so I can flush out what detritus remains from the rogue starlings or a lone grackle that flutters most of the water over the ground.

Another visitor is the bluebird, the one who is more of a visitant and a friend, who has hovered by the kitchen window to announce its presence, who stands erect on the back of a garden chair, appraising how clean the water in the birdbath might be, who darts to the rim and looks in, casting its gaze over the pool’s surface, sipping as it meets its reflection, before it flies up into the hazelnut tree, and with its rufous breast and chalk-blue feathers. streaks the air with color.

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.

Tipton Poetry Journal

Transcendental Meditation

AmyLerman

When I lived North, I would leave work in late afternoon duskiness and drive to Wal-Mart, where I could stand in the parking lot below geese heading west. I liked how their honks sounded rusty, in need of WD-40 or lozenges, so many hours coaching and staving off flight fatigue, their vees a model of shared governance. When the sky darkened my view, I would move towards the store, rotate in as parents squished toddlers into strollers, and employees linked carts, my list a prescription, some bananas, fresh socks mapping me through the store’s formation.

Amy Lerman lives with her husband and very spoiled cats in the Arizona desert and is residential faculty at Mesa Community College. Her manuscript, Orbital Debris, won the 2022 Jonathan Holden Poetry Chapbook Contest, and her poem "Why Is It" won the inaugural Art Young Memorial Award for Poetry. Her poems have appeared in or are forthcoming in Midway Journal,The Good Life Review, Radar Poetry, Rattle, Solstice, Smartish Pace, and other publications.

WilliamAarnes

It wasn’t the Fourth and I don’t recall how my step-nephew Colin four years older than me got hold of the powder but he stood that dark night at the end of the dock with his open bag of phosphorus digging out a spadeful to give it a fling to prove that the water would set it on fire. “Stand back,” he warned.

Poof! is not a word, even with an exclamation point, that’s searing enough for that flash

the nurse in the emergency room saying Colin’s facial burns weren’t as bad as he deserved but just a singe.

unexpected

WilliamAarnes

I was out on the deck lingering over breakfast when from off the roof or out of the clear sky a squirrel plopped down on my head a wallop of squirming plump belly. Beth examined my scalp for scratches. Nothing. Just perturbing surprise. Let’s hope death falls like that, unexpected and startled itself, so astonished it flops over the railing to the ground on its back, quickly rights itself and scurries across the yard and up a tree leaving you newly, wholly alert.

William Aarnes now lives in Manhattan after teaching at Furman University in South Carolina He is working on a project called Tries and Entries; Poems from the project in Ghost City Review and Your Impossible Voice. He has published poems in such magazines as in FIELD, The Southern Review, Tipton Poetry Journal and Poetry. His mosst recent book, The Hum in Human, was published by Main Street Rag in 2022.

Were it not for the firefly

JohnK.Kruschke

Summer's hot and summer's humid: Summer's trifling, endless, stupid.

Summer's games waste on all night, insects swarm under the lights, mindless phototropic creatures, like the people in the bleachers, mesmerized by play-by-play, eating dogs while they decay.

Dogs bark man at crack of dawn, roaring mowers bite the lawn, deaf'ning blowers blast the dust, wound with gas exhaust disgust.

August: Annexed 8 B.C., when Ceasar named a month "for Me!" because his uncle Julius already seized July from us.

July the Fourth: The flag's still there! The fireworks, bursting in air, remind us all of war's delights: Our children's fate is firefights. But wait... retreat.

The firefly in quiet night, in starlit sky, with summer's Milky Way aglow — still winks of wonders yet to know.

John K. Kruschke’s quatrains are published in a book with doggies on its cover and advanced statistical methods inside. He is a retired professor who has lived in Bloomington, Indiana, for 35 years.

Escaping into Art

CecilMorris

She wanted to erase the line between reality and art or step across that line and live as art alone, to be something finer (or more refined) than day to day demands allowed, the cook and clean of it. She tried living as a couplet, rhymed at first then unrhymed, with and without alliteration, but her body kept running over stanza breaks. She could not end-stop her appetites or the way she moved her hips, a sway that suggested sex and fruitfulness, something untaught, unlearned, but natural to her and unrehearsed, a violation of neat syllabic verse with attitude and assonance to spare (although she was herself a quiet soul or so she thought). She tried next a life in paint, in hyper-clarity and exactitude of photorealism’s verisimilitude, but that she found too tough to hold, day in, day out. This art is hard, she thought. She hummed herself to sleep and song, a minimalist two-note recitative, a wordless remove from life of mess, of shift and shake, of boundaries erased, re-drawn. These bars she liked and felt at last a home that held, an art that made her safe.

Cecil Morris, living in California and retired after 37 years of teaching high school English, now tries writing himself what he spent so many years teaching others to understand and (he hopes) enjoy. He has had a handful of poems published in English Journal, The Ekphrastic Review, Evening Street Review, Hole in the Head Review, The Midwest Quarterly, Poem, Sugar House Review and other literary magazines.

MichaelTrussler

maintained the same way of life, for without it the count and countess could not imagine life at all. Observes Tolstoy on page 515. War and Sleep. I thought it was exaggerating, the car next door that wouldn’t shut up about its stigmata, or maybe it was the fridge, I’m always unsure which machines are most immune to the ugly sentence . . . there are immediate reports of damage and vernacular questions that have made the commute from Boccaccio’s Florence to arrive here ready to be ignored. The word ridiculous comes to mind, Or don’t know no better, come what may. We’s been nabbed. Born as a has-never-been. The umbrella keeps trying to reason but our bodily fluids are off. The biggest surprise is that for all we know Life’s the same without you.

Does it still work the monumental architecture, the incredulous traces of famished human labour ant labour time labour

ghost-written and mock-executed in the recondite, the Iridescent Brain? Mostly. Nothing’s without risk, every day becoming the green light for thunder to scream into a pillow

Note: This poem arose from Joy Williams’s observation that Kafka was a writer who “was not immune to the ugly sentence.” See Joy Williams, The Serene Steamroller: On Kafka. Harper’s, May, 2024.

Michael Trussler lives in Regina, Saskatchewan and writes poetry, creative non-fiction and short stories. His memoir about his learning disability, The Sunday Book, won the 2024 Saskatchewan Book Award prizes in the City of Regina Award and in the category for non-fiction. He has published 3 poetry collections, the most recent are Realia (Radiant Press, 2024) and The History Forest (University of Regina Press, 2022).

12 They

One Workshop: The Dull Woman Tenders Her Heart

AllisonThorpe

The group of writers are into dissection. Eager surgeons, they cut and hack the body of my poem without offering anesthesia. Helmet-lit miners, they pickaxe verse searching for gold nuggets, the tabletop strewn with flesh and scree.

I remember a country porch and a garden view where I sat with a yellow lined pad. At the feeder, phoebes and blue jays scattered sunflower seeds and millet onto my pages. Groundhogs snuffled among my words while the dog barked his point of view. Deer snorts echoed through the lead of my pencil. Sometimes the sun flickered ideas between the lines.

Now the workshop group is driving my poem through the car wash, brushing and soaping and waxing. Trash collectors, they rake the leavings and roll their bins out to the curb. I wish they had given me a doggie bag instead so I could nibble on the trimmings, later, when my heart gets hungry. By moonlight, I could gnaw the fatty bones.

Allison Thorpe has published seven collections of poetry. She recently won The Designer’s Choice Award from The Poetry Box for her chapbook A Girl, Her Slipper, and Yesterday’s Rainbow. She also writes cozy mysteries, wishes she could travel the world as a poker pro, and lives in Lexington, Kentucky.

Family Therapy

ClaireScott

The couch is crowded. my mother, my father, two sisters and a brother, along with the ghosts of the long dead and the nearly dead.

And of course me.

Easy for us to light the kindling of conflict, each of us holding grudges and books of matches.

The therapist looks exhausted, unable to moderate the confusion, the accusations, who did what to whom and when. history tumbling like grenades across a war zone. The decibel level rises, shouts and screams and all the shocking words we were never allowed. Someone bangs on the door.

My mother claims I poisoned her, my brother insists he was the least loved, when obviously he was the favorite. My dead Aunt Eleanor accuses my mother of child abuse.

My older sister says I am a total lush, when she is the one slurring and slurping stashes of scotch. Me, a middle child, lost again. Watching a crazed ping pong match.

Me blurring into the wallpaper covered with wounded roses, while my younger sister loudly chants Om Mani Padme Hum, her fists in some show-offy mudra.

My father in a seersucker suit and striped tie sits calmly at the end of the couch, studying The Wall Street Journal. The ghost of Uncle Lynn lights a Corona.

The Journal catches fire, flames consuming the geometric patterns on the carpet. Police break in, Glock 22s drawn. The therapist flees.

Ode To My Planner

ClaireScott

I couldn’t live without you, my faithful faux-leather friend, with gold corners and gilt foiled paper edges. My dear companion who keeps me at the top of my game, even at eighty-two, when others are losing marbles faster than a Peregrine Falcon can fly. Reminding me of grandkids’ birthdays. Who is turning twelve and who will be twenty-two, as well as a dentist appointment next Wednesday a dreaded root canal, which I would pretend to forget but would be charged a tight-fisted fee.

Although this week you let me down. Maybe you’re losing your wits as well. Who is this “L” that I’m meant to have lunch with on Friday, my sister Louisa? my cousin Leila? Libby my hairdresser? You reminded me it was Jim’s birthday tomorrow, so I sent my next door neighbor a funny e-card filled with good wishes. He texted back that his birthday wasn’t until September. Wrong Jim. Marbles roll across the rug. The right Jim in Arizona, shuffling on his walker, waiting for a card.

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.

Shadows

EwenArnold

My shadow lies flat on the earth

Like a cartoon character

Run over by a steamroller

Somewhere a couple is dancing in the moonlight

To a song no one else can hear

A man shares the scraps he found in a bin

With a stray dog

A small boat chugs across an open sea full of hope

The final curtain has been delayed again

Maybe this time it was by a sunset.

Ewen Arnold lives in the hills above Kandy, Sri Lanka, with three dogs, two ponds, a large garden and his favourite tree. He has self-published three poetry booklets and judged poems and short stories for The Moving Finger. He had a poem accepted by Littoral Magazine for publication in June 2024.

Monkey Mind

RogerPfingston

On the way to yoga the day after Christmas

I heard on the local news that an overweight truck had collapsed an iron bridge in Indiana, which set me to thinking about obesity in America, how even trucks become stuffed beyond what’s best for them or those they serve, and then,

as it sometimes happens, such news got the best of my sense of decorum, transforming it to a mutinous sense of humor swelling to a tumor of trouble, my yoga class still ten minutes away and already my monkey mind was whispering how it would be: a smile, a chortle, a stifled rip of laughter, my whole body heaving, my tree pose felled to a flat-footed moron trying to apologize to my fellow yogis, a rattled verbiage of how the Gospel Street Bridge in Paoli dropped and crashed into Lick Creek on Christmas Day, undone by a truck hauling six times the posted limit, leading to my disconnect, my mind’s radical segue obesity nothing to laugh at, truck or human and by the time I arrived I was already turning around to take my sorry ass home.

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 is the author of Something Iridescent, a collection of poetry and fiction, as well as five chapbooks, the most recent being What’s Given, published by Kattywompus Press. New poems have appeared in recent issues of I-70 Review, Innisfree Poetry Journal, Salt, The Flying Island, and Valparaiso Poetry Review. Roger lives in Bloomington, Indiana.

In the Car

KarenLee

When he was three and I was old, we spent a lot of time in the car. Pick him up at his house, drop sister off at school, drive to my house, pick sister up from school, drive to my house, take him home. Sometimes we’d go shopping, to the park, or the library, but it seemed we were always in the car. We learned about the colors of stop lights, the difference between trucks and cars, the alphabet from signs. Lucas, where’s the sun?

Hiding behind the clouds Gigi. He’s older now he rides the bus, how dare he decide to go to school. I ride in my car alone, looking for him in the rearview mirror, waiting to sing a song.

Karen Lee writes poetry that falls out of her head onto the page. She writes middle grade fiction that uplifts normal girls that don’t kick ass. She writes cathartic life essays with her tongue in her cheek. When she’s not doing all that, she teaches graphic designs while continuously creating her own art. She is a constant and perpetual student herself taking class from Stanford University, Gotham Writers Workshops and the Indiana Writer Center. She lives in Cicero, Indiana.

Power Grid

JeanineStevens

A week topped-off with 116 degrees. Too hot for an afternoon walk,

air murky from the latest Sierra fire. Yet I have faith the mail will arrive.

I walk to the street to check. Down our road, the USPS truck parked, mailman lying spread-eagle in umbrella shade of a crepe myrtle. No A/C in his truck.

Passing by the front planter, gangly perennials need a trim; a monarch hangs on knobs of orange milkweed, unaware of its own beauty.

A hummingbird wriggles inside the tubular purple sage, so far inside he almost disappears, a fine tuned energy pack.

Four P.M., people read the text, abruptly turn off appliances, a notable dip in energy use. Tuna sandwiches for dinner.

Jeanine Stevens’ fifth collection, Left Handed Humming Bird, will be released by Clare Songbirds Publishing, 2024. Her latest chapbook is Tea in the Nun’s Library, (Eyewear Publishing, UK, 2022). She is winner of the MacGuffin Poet Hunt, WOMR Cape Cod Community Radio National Award, The Ekphrasis Prize, and The William Stafford Award. Gertrude Sitting: Portraits of Women won the Heartland Review Chapbook Contest. Jeanine has been published in Evansville Review, North Dakota Review, Chiron Review, Clackamas Literary Review, Muse and Two Thirds North (Sweden). Jeanine studied poetry at U.C. Davis, received her M.A. at CSU Sacramento and has a doctorate in Education. She is Professor Emerita at American River College.

License

TimothyRobbins

I see many changes and much continuity. I say nothing. I don’t see cars, trucks, motorbikes, moving fast, breathing hard, yet not out of breath. The vehicles are going to heaven where Christ won’t be. (Athletes and smokers have saved him.)

I was going but now I’m busy withholding a little something good strategy for poems and relationships. My partner taught me much about privacy. You can’t imagine what it cost him to walk into that shop where young men with racers’ legs, in spandex, gripped shining wrenches, and a woman no taller than his little mother and just as terse sealed the sheet that binds me to his insurance. In bored tones she explained she became a notary in the dark 70s when mopeds, like unions, had to be licensed.

Kenosha: January 2021

TimothyRobbins

The National Guard, The local police, my fellow teacher Jody, whose husband is their chief, the Black community here and ten minutes north in our sister city, the indicted, the indictors, the deciders, the owners of a downtown smoke shop that, last summer, lived up to its name in a way that maimed the business and defamed lawful protesters, the victim’s family and friends all are holding their breath today. My husband and I watch from our probably safe window. The snow remains deep and white. The sky is deeper and gray. Not a single drip from a single icicle betrays the impending verdict. The evergreens, those indomitable lungs, are not holding their breath. Neither are their deciduous kin. Seasonally, they stop breathing to survive.

Timothy Robbins teaches English as a Second Language. He has published six 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), This Night I Sup in Your House, and Florida and Other Waters (Cyberwit.net). He has been with his husband since 1998. They live in Wisconsin.

Flirt

MichaelKeshigian

A propellant when she smiles, she kindles a flame as she strokes my hair, kisses my cheek, or grasps my hand and giggles. I blush though my eyes reflect the fever she incites, even as she speaks in riddles and feels ungainly in my arms. I am victim of her charms, clever as a Mozart symphony minus the finale.

Michael Keshigian from Londonderry, New Hampshire, had his 14th poetry collection, What to Do with Intangibles recently published by Cyberwit.net. Published in numerous national and international journals, he is a 7- time Pushcart Prize and 3 - time Best of The Net nominee. His poetry cycle, Lunar Images was set for Clarinet, Piano, Narrator and premiered at Del Mar College in Texas. Subsequent performances occurred in Boston (Berklee College) and Moleto, Italy. Winter Moon, a poem set for Soprano and Piano, premiered in Boston.

Love Potion #9

KenMeisel

On a dark desert highway, cool wind in my hair, he sang out loud to himself, Hotel California,

The Eagles shit talking their way through the underbelly of Hollywood, its coke-life,

or Someday We’ll Be Together, The Supremes, Motown glitter-gown pop one could do love by,

or, I got a sixty-nine Chevy with a 396, fuelie heads and a Hurst on the floor, Springsteen & The E Street band at their best, in 78’, a song where it’s all on the line, drag racing for love, or Marvin, What’s Goin’ On, with that smooth, mellow sax-led progression that made you want to clip a joint, smoke it, get down with someone you just met. Or, say, Donna Summer, Love to Love Ya Baby, hot pulsing groove like a sweet slick snake, Cognac & a lit fire place. Sex. More of it, yep.

Now he’s turning off the highway, somewhere in Utah, dry land, dusty & lost cow skulls littering the road side & beer bottles. Now, at a motel with a six pack, a rackety television set, an old movie, &, wait, a rotary phone on which he could telephone her, back home in Owensboro, tell her he missed her &, when he returned, they’d hit that bottle again, of Love Potion # 9.

Ken Meisel is a poet and psychotherapist from the Detroit area. He is a 2012 Kresge Arts Literary Fellow, Pushcart Prize nominee, best of the net nominee, winner of the Liakoura Prize and the author of nine poetry collections. His new book, The Light Most Glad of All, was published in 2023 by Kelsay Press. It was reviewed by Tipton Poetry Journal and Trampoline Magazine. Other collections include: Studies Inside the Consent of a Distance (Kelsay Books: 2022) and Our Common Souls: New & Selected Poems of Detroit (Blue Horse Press: 2020). He has work in Crab Creek Review, I-70 Review, San Pedro River Review, Wasteland Review, The Glacier.

I tell my mother I don't believe in superpowers

EstherSadoff

I tell my mother I don't believe in superpowers I don't believe in everyday heroes. My mother says My superpower is caring. Your father's superpower is talking. He can talk to anyone and it's true. My mother dances into and out of conversations, leaving my father to talk as if one person could talk for both, hear for both, and my mother does care. My mother loves an underdog, my mother loves the struggle. So why can't she be a warrior in some crusade for the piano student who doesn't get it the first time? The student who overcomes some pain or struggle? I think I am an underdog too. Everything I learned, I had to write down three times. I even wrote each question down as if the answer were hiding in the question. When I leave my parents’ house, my father instructs me again on how to close the self-closing door (with the note that says Let door self-close). My mother hugs me in a tight embrace, punctuating each pulse with a whack on the back. Driving home in the dark, the fear creeps back in. I feel like my heart is exposed to sky, soaking in rain and wind. Dampness creeping in as if the edges of the world were getting colder and colder. I feel every bone exposed and no I don't believe in superpowers or maybe my superpower is how I don't give in.

Esther Sadoff is a teacher and writer from Columbus, Ohio. Her poems have been featured or are forthcoming in Little Patuxent Review, Jet Fuel Review, Cathexis Poetry Northwest, Pidgeonholes, Santa Clara Review, South Florida Poetry Journal, among others. She has three forthcoming chapbooks: Some Wild Woman (Finishing Line Press), Serendipity in France (Finishing Line Press), and Dear Silence (Kelsay Books).

Learning to Go the Other Way

CharleneLangfur

I see him hide and crouch under the fan palms. He drinks expensive coffees and lives off his brother. He learned my name and where I live because I know his brother, my neighbor, yet another man who drinks too much and does not like women. I forget how dangerous such men are until one of them shows up around me again like this one, like this man did, a man with a wry smile, with assumption in his voice, with a strange self-importance. The fan palm leaves sway in the wind as he makes phone call after phone call without looking up. He is another illegal tenant with no clear income. I plant seeds in my garden during these winter days when I worry about the Ukrainians and the Gazans while this man speaks sarcastically and waves at me, showing up out of the blue in a white undershirt. I am old enough to know he should not be here and all his idle time is a sign of trouble. This is how it is these days as I work at home, caring for a blond little rescued dog, tending the sunflowers growing tall in my garden porch. Tall green stems. Petals yellow as the sun. I remember the first time I decided to go the other way during this time, with my leash in hand, taking the safer road instead of the direct route, walking in the opposite direction from him, picking a fat orange or two, closing my eyes in the sunshine, hoping he’ll be gone by the next time I get back home.

Charlene Langfur lives in the California desert and is an LGBTQ and green writer, an organic gardener with many poems in Poetry East, Room, Weber, and most recently in the special Monet issue of Poetry East,The Hiram Poetry Review, North Dakota Quarterly, London’s Acumen.

The bush is devoid of all berries

MykytaRyzhykh

The bush is devoid of all berries

Autumn is now stripping off the leaves too

The future is uncertain

[This poem was first published by Boats Against the Current]

Mykyta Ryzhykh lives in Ukraine and is winner of the international competition Art Against Drugs and Ukrainian contests Vytoky, Shoduarivska Altanka, Khortytsky dzvony; laureate of the literary competition named after Tyutyunnik, Lyceum, Twelve, named after Dragomoshchenko. Nominated for Pushcart Prize. Published many times in the journals Dzvin, Dnipro, Bukovinian magazine, Polutona, Rechport, Topos, Articulation, Formaslov, Literature Factory, Literary Chernihiv, Tipton Poetry Journal, Stone Poetry Journal, Divot journal, dyst journal, Superpresent Magazine, Allegro Poetry Magazine, Alternate Route, Better Than Starbucks Poetry & Fiction Journal, Littoral Press, Book of Matches, on the portals Litсenter, Ice Floe Press and Soloneba, in the Ukrainian literary newspaper.

In the Driveway, Washing the Car

LeahBrowning

His mother died lying in bed watching Wheel of Fortune.

He keeps forgetting that she’s dead, keeps picking up the phone to call her house and ask if she needs a refill of her medication or a ride to the doctor’s office.

She’d been ill for so long that it was as much of a shock as if she’d been a health nut in her early thirties.

On Mother’s Day, he washes her car and puts on two coats of wax just the way she used to like it, and makes himself a breakfast of chocolate croissants and bacon with a pitcher of milk and fresh flowers on the table. That evening, I see the blue glow of his television as he watches all the game shows he’s spent the rest of the week taping.

That evening, as I’m taking off my macaroni necklaces, from the window of my bedroom I can see the blue glow.

[First published in When the Sun Comes Out After Three Days of Rain, a collection of poetry by Leah Browning (Kelsay Books, 2022)]

Leah Browning is the author of Two Good Ears and Loud Snow, mini-books of flash fiction published by Silent Station Press, and When the Sun Comes Out After Three Days of Rain, a full-length collection of poetry published by Kelsay Books. She is also the author of three short nonfiction books for teens and preteens and six chapbooks of poetry and fiction. Browning’s work has previously appeared in Harpur Palate, Four Way Review, Flock, Contrary Magazine, Superstition Review, Waxwing, Terrain.org, Parhelion Literary Magazine, Necessary Fiction, Oyster River Pages, Poetry South, Ponder Review, The Westchester Review, The Stillwater Review, and elsewhere. In addition to writing, Browning has edited the Apple Valley Review since 2005. She lives in California.

Dream Visits

DianaL.Day

I often go to the place I used to live, but only when I am asleep.

I sit in the kitchen, walk down the halls and gaze out the windows at the views I remember. Other people live there now. I can envision them in the rooms where I spent my days. But I wonder –when I visit their house in my dreams, do I disturb their sleep?

Diana L. Day won the poetry prize from a chapter of the Poetry Society of Texas as a teenager. She then worked as an advertising copywriter for ad agencies in Atlanta and New York City. Now retired and living in Georgia, she has returned to her first love of writing poems. Her work has appeared in Witcraft, Types & Shadows, and ONE ART: A Journal of Poetry and will be published in the Pure Slush Lifetime Anthology in July and in Door = Jar in September.

Emergence

NoloSegundo

Once… I took long walks through the Universe making giant strides across formless space (just the way a giant would) thrilled to think if it never ended it would yet be too soon. People took me for a child,

were deceived by simple disguise for I was seer, prophet, and beggar.

One day as I was meandering across the Milky Way movement stopped I had touched the Fear and froze fast to It with all the desperate and mad ardor of a melting icicle for the roof ledge.

Unseeing days string into beads of blind years-I became the criminal courting his cell, a burnt out Prometheus on his boring hill, an ox of ignorance forever pulling a water wheel (but there is no water), or to say it another way, a sleepwalker who dreamt he was awake….

I stopped looking for escape, turned a key to lock chains that never were and existed only for an endless treading in a vacuum of utter emptiness... until a push and a long, long falling through a tunnel filled with nightmare and madness and tears suddenly to awaken like Alice did from the dreams of ants to the dreams of Emperors, Kings and Queens.

Now I wear life as a jewel around my neck and enter only houses with many doors.

Nolo Segundo, pen name of L. J. Carber, became a published poet in his 70's in over 200 literary journals in 16 countries. A trade publisher has released 3 collections in paperback: The Enormity of Existence [2020]; Of Ether and Earth [2021]; and Soul Songs [2022]. These titles reflect the awareness he's had for over 50 years since having an NDE whilst almost drowning in a Vermont river: That he has IS a consciousness that predates birth and survives death, what poets since Plato have called the soul. Nominated for the Pushcart Prize and thrice for Best of the Net, he's a retired English/ESL teacher [America, Japan, Taiwan, Cambodia] who's been married 43 years to a smart and beautiful Taiwanese woman. He lives in New Jersey.

Fun Fact

LeslieSchultz

There is a storied tree in Delaware its canopy vertiginously high. They say that once upon a time, long before the Constitution, it planted itself beside a stream bed now long gone. These sycamores are unusual. For all trees, new growth requires greater girth each year. And bark their front-facing defense against pests, diseases, elements must flex in outward ripples. With sycamores, rigidity creates distinctive bark, a kind of street-fashion camo mottled plates of broken color ashen white, dove grey, smeary yellow, and dusty pale green. These rigid giants glide in slo-mo toward the sky.

I think of snakes with scales, shedding old skins as they grow formidable and more wise. What I did not know about sycamores is how they hollow out with centuries, create wide chambers tucked within themselves. Why do they do this? And how does inside spaciousness relate to outer clenching? An arborist mentions a “fun fact” that the aged sycamore beauty crowning a green hill at Winterthur has been filled with twelve tons of concrete, not to mention train rails and a host of other metals. This happened in 1951, has kept the tree upright, its sap flowing, its leaves green and opening each spring. I presume it has gained a further seventy rings, pleasing (and outliving) H. F. Dupont, that careful steward. So now I’m wondering how best to shore myself up for the long haul while still keeping my heart wide open.

Mulberries

LeslieSchultz

Morus alba

I awoke dreaming of mulberries, ripe fruit. Red gone sweet black and seedy. Underfoot or on the lips nearly bloody. Tart-sweet over or under summer grass.

In one of those houses I lived in, oh, age ten or so, there I came to know mulberries.

There was a small tree well away from the back door that bore more fruit than seemed real; and, tired of eating, I would squeeze their ink, draw words on garden slates. Words for the wind and rain to take, to make into ruddy rivulets finer

than silk or paper, a flowing that was a kind of knowing or unknowing, a returning to grass, to white roots, to the making dark.

Leslie Schultz (Northfield, Minnesota) has four collections of poetry; of these, Concertina (Kelsay Books) is her most recent. Her poetry has appeared widely, in such journals as Poet Lore, Midwest Quarterly, Naugatuck River Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Tipton Poetry Journal, and Blue Unicorn. She serves as a judge for the Maria W. Faust Sonnet Contest. In addition to poems, she publishes photographs, essays, and fiction; makes quilts and soups; and happily mucks about in a garden plagued by shade, rabbits, and walnut trees.

Settling Accounts

ArthurMcMaster

Who wants to come home from the bank, sit down in the La-ZBoy, and pick up a totally turgid poem? Not me. So it’s no to Alfred Tennyson’s gullible Persephone preggers and trapped in the Underworld owing to the wholly inappropriate machinations of her randy Zeus, a kind of über-god who nevertheless has his thundering hands deep into all the drama that goes along with keeping shop down there in Hades even on a good day, which this one certainly was not because the window tellers didn’t balance again and Assistant Manager Don Van Dreiser was out sick once more with some illness his physician described as idiopathic, which means his insurance probably won’t cover it. And no, as well, to George Gordon Lord Byron’s downer Thermopylae poem, another gates of hell folie de guerre, where one aggrieved Persian King dispatches an overmatched, scantily clad Spartan army in 480 BC; where no one in his right mind would have ever dreamed of putting his drachma in a bank, even one where the clerks knew what they were doing, not lollygagging when the boss is out or worrying about what their daughters were up to.

Arthur McMaster’s work has been featured in such literary journals as Subtropics, North American Review, Poet Lore, Rattle, Rhino, Poet Lore, and Poetry East. He teaches in the Continuing Education program at Furman University in South Carolina. His most recent poetry book is The Whole Picture Show.

Did I

ArvillaFee

well, pardon me did I hurt your egg-shell ego

did I tear down the façade you worked so hard to build

did I not cover up the bruise with enough foundation

did I expose a secret you never wished to tell

did I fall short of expectations to be seen but never heard

did I clean out the closet with too much cloak and dagger

did I slip through your fingers like sand gone through a sieve

Arvilla Fee teaches English Composition for Clark State College in Ohio, and is the managing editor for the San Antonio Review. She has published poetry, photography, and short stories in numerous presses, including Calliope, North of Oxford, Rat’s Ass Review, Mudlark, and many others. Her poetry books, The Human Side and This is Life, are available on Amazon. Arvilla loves writing, photography and traveling, and she never leaves home without a snack and water (just in case of an apocalypse). For Arvilla, writing produces the greatest joy when it connects us to each other. To learn more about her work, you can visit her website: https://soulpoetry7.com/

At the Coffee Shop

D.R.James

Outside, a window washer watches me watching him, works his rhythm, window after window, simulating a seamlessness, tipping his squeegee after every-other downward stroke, coercing the water to run like blood from each overlapping pass, though of course he can’t touch my shining smudges, the smeared prints inside, five-eighths of a glinting inch away.

D. R. James, retired from 40 years of teaching college writing, literature, and peace studies, lives with his psychotherapist wife in the woods near Saugatuck, Michigan. His latest of ten collections is Mobius Trip (Dos Madres Press, 2021).

https://www.amazon.com/author/drjamesauthorpage

Used and Rare

Two shuffles off a red brick sidewalk in Zionsville Indiana, a black rocking chair waits for the husband who could care less about a used or rare book. He people watches while “the wife” shops, nods off to the Black Dog Books sign

creaking in the breeze.

Inside, the shop’s mascot, sleeps on the floor, curled up, nose to tail. A red collar contrasts his shiny black coat. It’s as if he read one of the books on a top shelf, the one with the most dust published at the turn of the 20th century.

He tunes out readers and collectors who prattle on about books. Always books, he thinks. Books, books, books, books that change lives, books about Sherlock Holmes, books containing war stories, leather bound books, out of print books, new author books, and of course, a bounty of used and rare books.

The husband and the black dog have no use for any book held inside the quaint white clapboard house with black trim and a red door.

Lori Zavada writes poetry and prose steeped in insight and imagery of nature and the human condition. Her poems can be found in Halfway Down the Stairs, Amethyst Review, Oprelle Poetry Collection, WayWords, Emerald Coast Review and her chapbook First Flight. In her small coastal town of Pensacola, Florida, she engages with a community of talented, supportive writers.

The Price of Poetry

GeneTwaronite

A spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings the poet called it, supposedly revisited in blessed moments of tranquility but for me triggering moments of spontaneous combustion setting the chemicals to glow and ignite.

At times I longed to die and become pure spirit. But what is spirit without emotion and what are tears compared to the unknown horrors of the soul?

O how I wished I could be more Vulcan like Spock and learn to control the fiery outflow. But first I had to contain it and not get burned. Gradually I learned to cool things down through a reverse binocular vision. The smaller and farther away things got the less they could hurt me. Even my self seemed smaller.

I could now write from a safe distance unencumbered by closeness to subject. And I could try to imagine what it must be like for a person to feel so strongly that he would light himself on fire or stick her head in the oven, as my words floated placidly on the page.

What Do Trees Talk About?

GeneTwaronite

Now that we know how they signal each other through root hairs and fungal threads of meaning, will we ever learn to read these signals and know what it is they talk about in the dark loamy layers below?

Surely there must be more to their talk than survival as when insects or fires threaten, just as we sapiens came to learn grunts and guttural sounds could signify so much more than danger when wolves or tigers were near but …

what I want to know is do they ever sweet talk each other sending love notes to nearby birches as they bend in the breeze and sing praises to Mother Tree who watches over all?

Do they speak in hushed tones of what it must be like to walk on feet or touch each other the way those wise apes do and wonder if trees will ever learn to read their signals when words are too shallow and coarse for root hairs to hear and smoke signals fill the valleys with the scent of disaster?

Gene Twaronite is a Tucson poet and the author of five poetry collections. His first poetry book, Trash Picker on Mars, was the winner of the 2017 New Mexico-Arizona Book Award. His latest poetry collection is Death at the Mall (Kelsay Books). He leads a poetry workshop for University of Arizona OLLI. Follow more of Gene’s writing at: genetwaronitepoet.com.

Walking Home

Michael Miller

At dusk he lay beside Her gravestone and felt An unexpected peace, His lips were immoveable As the grass beneath his body. No wind cut a path Through the air, His undelivered thoughts Had been left In an envelope Waiting to be mailed. He knew the moon Would shortly rise Indifferent to his Slow walk home. There he would Sit in her chair, Put on her glasses And see through her eyes.

Michael Miller’s poems have appeared in The Kenyon Review, The Sewanee Review, The Yale Review, and Raritan. His third book, Darkening the Grass, was a “Must Read 2013” selection of the Massachusetts Books Awards. His new book, War Zone, will be forthcoming from Finishing Line Press. Michael Miller was born in 1940 and served for four years in the Marine Corps. He now lives in Amherst, Massachusetts.

Homeward

SyanMohiuddin

The motor-way is thick with life Like a steely, gray exodus: A train of cars, from one end to The other. ‘Morning trafficʼs the worst,’ He says with a hand on the wheel And the other rubbing his head. Orange-yellow blips convulsing On the road ahead, honking with The sheer drive of potassium-ion Batteries. Eight-wheeler engines And horns in the traffic chorus. Says: ‘From whennes cometh my waillynge.’ From work, the displeasure of time, To a leasehold that is his yolk; And his yoke, the roll-cage around His stuffed body. His livelihood.

Syan Mohiuddin is a poet from Dhaka, Bangladesh, who is currently studying for a BA in English Literature. His poetry will have forthcoming appearances, or has already appeared, in the South Dakota Review and Bacopa Literary Review. He teaches English and literature on the side, and in his free time likes to rifle through libraries.

The Ecstasy of Social Media

Tim Rogers

I am freshly emerged straight from the depths of Hell I bring the newest nooze there is Being there

I say Facebook Twitter and Instagram Have made you relinquish ownership of your souls

Strange You said you never would I knew I never could And now all of that has changed We are left to decode the signs , read The arrows painted to define our lanes

Subtle demarcations

I know this sign is mine Over there’s the ad designed to take you on your ride

Tim Rogers is a two-time immigrant, not always with legal status. His poems have appeared in Mudfish, Bombay Gin, Otoliths, Banyan Review an e-ratio among other places. He has been anthologized in The Return of Král Majáles (Litteraria Pragensia). He lives in the Czech Republic.

To Be Interviewed by Terry Gross

J.AlanNelson

I’m so profane. Oh, to be spotted in Union Square or discovered in a Santa Fe café. I once wept at a traffic light during her interview with Maurice Sendak. I’m ready for her questions: how did art strip my innocence away,

what are my delusions, what is my polycrisis.

Unfortunately, I’m mundane, stranded in the public domain. There is no franchise, no tentpole, no universe of Alan.

Gertrude Stein orders me from her Paris establishment, and when I delay, Hemingway throws me into the street after a vicious uppercut to the jaw. I lay my head on a table and watch the Vermeer light shine through the patio door as I bathe my grandchild. My friends would sneer if I said Vermeer. They don’t know Terry Gross. They say Terry Gross is just another woman on a planet filled with men and women. True, I say, but I still want to talk to Terry Gross.

J. Alan Nelson, a writer and actor who lives in Waco, Texas, received nominations for a Pushcart Prize, Best of Net and Best Microfiction. He has work published or forthcoming in journals including New York Quarterly, Hog River Press, Maryland Literary Review, Main Street Rag, Texas Observer, Arc, California Quarterly, Connecticut River Review, Adirondack Review, Red Cedar Review, Wisconsin Review, South Carolina Review, North Dakota Quarterly and Eunoia Review. He also played the lead in the viral video Does This Cake Make Me Look Gay? and the verbose “Silent Al” in the Emmy-winning SXSWestworld, and narrated New York Time

The Stars Die Alone

GeorgeFreek

From so far away the stars, pay me no mind. They inhabit an otherworldly time, and they appear dismembered. They throw so little light, I can see nothing, nothing but the shadow of a make-believe blackbird, in the shadow of a make-believe tree. It’s a kind of poetry, but the moon won’t uncover her eyes, and she never speaks to me.

George Freek is a poet/playwright living in Belvidere, Illionois. George Freek's poetry appears in numerous journals and reviews. His poem "Night Thoughts" was recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize. His poem "Enigmatic Variations" was also recently nominated for Best of the Net. His collection Melancholia is published by Red Wolf Editions.

Lessons in floating

AnaReisens

Once Mrs. Natos wore a red balloon sweater. It inflated around her stringy frame and promised to float her away, dry erase marker in hand, to the place where patterns swirl in marshmallows and cloud soup. She talked about syllables, sounds, and the movement of lips but all I could see was the fan in the corner and how if it turned just a little bit more to the left, she would float away.

Ana Reisens lives in Spain and is a word-wrangler with two X chromosomes and a soft spot for leftovers. You can find her work in The Threepenny Review, The Bombay Literary Magazine, and Sixfold, among other places, and she promises she’ll always return your Tupperware.

Review: The Poem Stands on Its Head by the Window by

Bonnie Maurer

ReviewedbyBarryHarris

Title: The Poem Stands on Its Head by the Window

Author: Bonnie Maurer

Year: 2023

Publisher: Finishing Line Press

I think Bonnie Maurer is a master of creating images through her near perfect word choice that lets the reader not only appreciate an allusion, but also uncover the poet’s thoughts and feelings that gave birth to it.

In the title poem, which falls last in this collection like a train conductor waving goodbye to us from the caboose, I am still startled by a buckeye falling out of our title poem’s pocket.

Coins knock and jangle, clocks collide, and a buckeye, polished as childhood, slides from the poem’s pocket into the rivered shag. Guns, bombs, missiles still fly in its head. The poem’s feet flex a silent beat. Can the poem move a line of soldiers aimed to kill? Change a word to stop the genocide? … The poem has seen the blue marble fully lit from space. So what gives, the poem asks, rearranging roots, hands and feet and blood and breath to accommodate a world of violence and wonder? The poem floats on a blue scribbled ground and ochre sky, reaches like Jacob’s ladder. When can the poem come down, walk among the pineapple groves, tupelo trees, the cosasts of Maine and Madagascar, under the mottled green leaves safe again to marvel at you and me?

The buckeye, recalled to us by the poet from a time when buckeyes in pockets were a thing, serves as a symbol of childhood innocence in stark

contrast to a world of “guns, bombs, missiles.” The question, Maurer poses, is when will it be safe for the poem to come down and walk among us? She tries to answer that question in the four unnamed sections which I have tentatively identified, perhaps inaccurately as: stories from youth including mother/daughter tales, family stories, stories spoken from the vantage point of age, and, tucked between them like a Warsaw ghetto, a third section of stories of Hitler and the Holocaust.

What I admire most about Maurer’s poetry is her ability to find just the right choice of words for the reader to glimpse more precisely what the poet means and that perhaps it could not be said any better in a different way.

In “Love, War and the News, 2002,” she tells us directly “and you can quote me / on that for your country song.”

In “Midwestern Elegy” Maurer ends the poem with Cornstalks bend at the knees. The last barn you pass gapes at you holy and with its teeth out.

In “Tiny City of Remembrances,” we hear how:

Mother pulled the bacon from my throat

Like a mother bird in reverse, saving me at five.

In an ekphrastic offering, “In Rohall’s Diner,”Maurer presents us with a perfectly clear image known to an automotive America on the cusp of war.

Outside the diner their Buick grins all its chrome teeth shining.

We are introduced to the third and longest section by being asked to wonder what Himmler ate for lunch in Minsk in 1941, a lunch when Himmler came to believe it would be necessary to find a killing method that would not have a disheartening influence on the executioners.

I found the references in “The Survivor’s Story” especially compelling as the poet invokes the plain repetition of Hebrew parallelism:

And it was good the first day and they were not dead… And this is how they did not die

For 90 days and nights in their grave bed… And Meyer did not plead for divine help. He did not ask God to spread the canopy of peace over all.

At sixteen, Meyer lost his orthodox hat and gave up God.

This is echoed in “Ticket to His Father’s Nightmare:”

Darkness covers the face of the deep. He is his father’s scream. No one can hear him… He is carried out.

Into light. In a Warsaw hospital. Dead And resusitated. He is his father’s breath. There is morning. The first day.

That the war did not end discretely in history is presented for our consideration in “Dorit’s Story: In My House the War Did Not End in 1945.”

Hitler, the silhouette in our shade. Hitler, in the carpet of my parent’s footsteps…

Hitler, in mother’s apple strudel. Hitler, in the bubble eyes of dish suds…

At my own house, I remember It was Rosh Hashanah.

I always had my parents here for dinner. No sooner did my parents sit down

And my father would start, Hitler this and Hitler that.

I stood up in front of my children, In front of my husband.

Tipton Poetry Journal

Did you notice there is no chair here for Hitler? He was not invited to this meal.

In several poems hatched from pilgrimages to holocaust sites such as Auschwitz, Birkenau, and Treblinka, the poet reminds us of the reality of history. Here is the ending to “Auschwitz-Birkenau Tour:”

And there is no after. We bend to our knees At the gas chamber, Compelled to look back, Something in us turning to salt.

But in “Forgiveness,” the poet brings forth the spirit of holocaust survivor Eva Kor:

Cold, shivering at ten. Her living sky darkened from the injections of Dr. Mengele, Angel of Death at Auschwitz… At 60, she stood again on the birkenau platform-of-no-return, where Mengele had pointed her aside with her twin. She danced the rain in that misery until the child of ten let the old woman go.

The sky stopped pelting. “Joy,” cried Eva Kor in fair weather.

“Forgive,’ she cries now The power of that thunder.

Bonnie Maurer has created a poetry collection in which the poem itself becomes a character witnessing its place in a life of family, culture, and history a poem standing on its head, perhaps unaware that:

Even so, the poem cannot reverse the order of things. The fruit bowl on the table spills plums, blue and speckled, still ready to split their skins. Brains still blow up at markets and blood rains the beach.

Tipton Poetry Journal

Bonnie Maurer holds an MFA in Poetry from Indiana University. She was a finalist for the Poet Laureate of Indiana in 2020. Her poems have been featured in a variety of publications from The New York Times to the local Kurt Vonnegut Museum and Library anthology, So It Goes, to the 6th floor ceiling of St. Vincent Hospital. Maurer has conducted creative writing/healing workshops for numerous community populations: the homeless in recovery, the HIV+/AIDS affected/infected, for cancer patients, seniors, veterans, and for grades 1-12. She recently retired from the Indianapolis Business Journal after 28 years. She works as an Ai Chi instructor at the JCC and has been a JCC member for her entire life.

Barry Harris is editor of the Tipton Poetry Journal and several 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.

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

Review: The Invisible by Alessio Zanelli

ReviewedbyBarryHarris

Title: The Invisible

Author: Alessio Zanelli

Year: 2024

Publisher: Greenwich Exchange

Alessio Zanelli's The Invisible is an examination of unseen threads that connect us to our inner selves and the world around us. This collection of poetry invites readers to delve into the depths of human experience, where emotions, memories, and the intangible aspects of life intertwine.

Zanelli captivates with his evocative and lyrical imagery. The title piece, "The Invisible," as the last poem in the collection sets the tone as it reflects on the elusive nature of connection.

I watch her watch me, pupils into pupils, but there’s no eye contact. Something is missing, the intangible tie. Souls caress for an instant but fail to touch

These lines hint at the essence of longing and the struggle to bridge the gaps between individuals. This theme of invisibility resonates throughout the collection, as Zanelli explores the complexities of relationships and the often unheard silent cries for help.

Tipton Poetry Journal

In "Stellar Graffitist.” Zanelli illustrates the power of creativity and memory through vibrant metaphors. The imagery of "fluorescent neon markers" streaking the night sky reminds us of the beauty that can emerge from our childhood dreams. The poem encapsulates a yearning to make sense of the chaos that too often surrounds us.

Zanelli's reflective nature is highlighted in “The Loss,” where he contemplates the passage of time and the inevitable fading of innocence. The nostalgic tone evokes a sense of melancholy as the poet grapples with the changes that life brings. These next lines lines, resonate with anyone who has experienced the bittersweet nature of growing up and the loss of simpler times:

Time makes impetus taper down, Differences fade, both black and white just look like gray

In “Having Being,” Zanelli admits:

Never have I crossed the dell, swum the small lake, ascended the summit, but I’ve been watching or else imagining them for quite a long time, happy they are there.

Zanelli's voice is both intimate and universal, allowing readers to find their own experiences mirrored in his words. The collection is an invitation to embrace the unseen connections that shape our existence.

The Invisible speaks to the heart of human experience. With its rich imagery, poignant themes, and introspective nature, this book of poems investigates the depths of connection, memory, and the unseen forces that influence our lives. While much may remain invisible, Zanelli’s poetry explores the profoundly real emotions and experiences that bind us.

Tipton Poetry Journal

Alessio Zanelli is an Italian poet who has long adopted English as his literary language. His work has appeared in over 200 literary magazines from 18 countries.He is the author of six collections, most recently The Invisible (Greenwich Exchange, London, 2024), and a chapbook titled Amalgam (Cyberwit, India, 2021), the former poetry editor of Private Photo Review, an international magazine of b/w photography and short writings, and the Italian Stanza Representative for The Poetry Society of London.

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

Contributor Biographies

Leah Browning is the author of Two Good Ears and Loud Snow, mini-books of flash fiction published by Silent Station Press, and When the Sun Comes Out After Three Days of Rain, a full-length collection of poetry published by Kelsay Books. She is also the author of three short nonfiction books for teens and pre-teens and six chapbooks of poetry and fiction. Browning’s work has previously appeared in Harpur Palate, Four Way Review, Flock, Contrary Magazine, Superstition Review, Waxwing, Terrain.org, Parhelion Literary Magazine, Necessary Fiction, Oyster River Pages, Poetry South, Ponder Review, The Westchester Review, The Stillwater Review, and elsewhere. In addition to writing, Browning has edited the Apple Valley Review since 2005. She lives in California.

Tipton Poetry Journal

In addition to Tipton Poetry Journal, the poetry and prose of Robert L. Penick have appeared in well over 200 different literary publications, including The Hudson Review, North American Review, Plainsongs, and Oxford Magazine. The Art of Mercy: New and Selected Poems is now available from Hohm Press, and more of his work can be found at theartofmercy.net. He lives in Louisville, Kentucky.

Tipton Poetry Journal

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.

Tipton Poetry Journal

Michael Trussler lives in Regina, Saskatchewan and writes poetry, creative non-fiction and short stories. His memoir about his learning disability, The Sunday Book, won the 2024 Saskatchewan Book Award prizes in the City of Regina Award and in the category for nonfiction. He has published 3 poetry collections, the most recent are Realia (Radiant Press, 2024) and The History Forest (University of Regina Press, 2022).

Gene Twaronite is a Tucson poet and the author of five poetry collections. His first poetry book, Trash Picker on Mars, was the winner of the 2017 New Mexico-Arizona Book Award. His latest poetry collection is Death at the Mall (Kelsay Books). He leads a poetry workshop forUniversity of Arizona OLLI. Follow more of Gene’s writing at: genetwaronitepoet.com.

Editor

Barry Harris is editor of the Tipton Poetry Journal and several 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. 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.