Month: October 2017

The Witch in Hansel and Gretel Speaks by Gayle Kaune

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I am the bad one in this story, I know.
But just think: I’m alone in the forest,
maybe I am gimpy with stroke,
or have Alzheimers, a heart condition.

I’m the mother of the step-mother
who sent those kids into the woods to starve.
And what about me, abandoned
in this lean-to shack the color of burnt gingerbread?

I take those rug rats in.
I don’t shove them in my oven.
I feed them candy and milk.
Spies, they are, for my heartless
daughter. She wants me dead.

Medicare ain’t paying for no dementia
ward and there are no beds at Eastern State
Hospital. Yes, I’m diagnosed with a psychosis
NOS, not otherwise specified, but I’m not
going to eat those kids. Cannibalism?
No way, but really, didn’t being a mother
eat me up? The constant worry, earnest
as hunger. The only reward for suckling
them, sore nipples, veiny breasts.

Nobody cares about the old woman
with shriveled ovaries, so they call us witch.
I’ve only taken your cutie-pies hostage,
not that their stepmom, cares,
not that anyone gives a damn.

Child Protective Services
will eventually be called
but it will be too late.
I will have relieved the parents of their little
burdens, then spread their ashes over the moss.

Gather sticks for a large pyre,
Hansel and Gretel, your Grandmama
will soon join you. The crows
can witness how brightly
cast-off things burn.

 

 

Gayle Kaune has been published widely in literary magazines including Poet and Critic, Crab Creek Review, Seattle Review, Milkweed Editions, South Florida Poetry Review, and Centennial Review. She has won several Washington Poets Awards, a Ben Hur Lampmann award, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her book, Still Life in the Physical World, was published by Blue Begonia Press; her latest, All the Birds Awake, is available from Tebot Bach. She also has two chapbooks: N’Sid-Sen-Star and Concentric Circles, which won the Flume Press Award. Her latest manuscript, Noise From Stars, is looking for a home.

Make Soup, You Said by Wren Tuatha

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I’m making a soup
to fill my bowl.
I’m after that carrot of consolation
you dangle.
I would remember
a recipe
uttered
in that season of my childhood
without language.
The three sisters–
corn, beans and squash…
When they hold hands
they can give weight
while they dance and stir,
balanced in a circle chain,
resolved, complete.

If I know the right herbs,
if my flame is humble,
if I stir with the tide,
if I ladle with steadiness,
if I eat with grace,
if I digest with stillness,
I will understand
why you have gone.
I wrote you a letter.
I burnt it,
buried it,
scattered it,
sent it sailing,
nailed it to my bed.
Make soup, you said, nothing is simple.

(First published in Baltimore Review.)

 

 

Wren Tuatha (Califragile Editor). Wren’s poetry has appeared or is upcoming in The Cafe Review, Canary, Poetry Pacific, Peacock Journal, Coachella Review, Arsenic Lobster, Baltimore Review, Pirene’s Fountain, Loch Raven Review, Clover, Lavender Review, Autumn Sky Poetry Daily, and Bangalore Review. She’s also an editor at PoetryCircle.com. Wren and her partner, author/activist C.T. Lawrence Butler, herd skeptical goats on a mountain in California.

Not Even the Birds Can Be Trusted by Katelyn Thomas

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They wander the Gobi
in search of wings,
step instead into a red snare.
Only the sorrowing stars see
their pain drenched hope.
They stretch out their
hands to see if perhaps
it is that they are
invisible and discover that
the face of Kim Jong-un
is tattooed on their skin.

They watch the news –
more than one channel now –
and ask the birds if
America will blow up
their mother’s cousin, who
wasn’t discovered watching
a Hollywood movie and
is still alive in the maw
of the regime, hoping that
the stars will call to the moon,
“Sister, what is happening here?”

 

 

Katelyn Thomas is a poet and photographer who works in the children’s department of her local library. She spends her free time hiking, reading and watching her rambunctious hens cavorting in the sunlight. She has most recently been published in Social Justice Poetry and Haiku Journal.

Wind Song by Aparna Sanyal

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In through the mullioned windows and doors,
the wind comes traipsing-
Look, she says
at my skirt of leaves!
A sashay, a susurration,
it has a tutus’ delicacy-
Wraithlike, wrapped in wisps,
inconsequential but binding.
And sometimes
it is a gown of velvet and plush ochre,
autumnal in its flow,
riveting in its gaze.
Sometimes the leaves are Pan.
And I dance and dance to
a flute melody for my ears alone.
I wander mist laden, dew embedded
through halls and galleries,
arches and naves,
finding corners to resonate me
with fitting music
and songs of yore.
At night, waxing, waning moon crescents
twinkle through my firmament.
I am in bowls and galaxies too-
Find me, I am all around you.
Hollownesses make me full,
unbound I ruffle your hair-
I am a lovers’ touch
I am a sighs’ despair.
In through mullioned windows
and doors I roam.
Wed to eternity,
to soil and loam.

 

 

An MA from Kings College, London, Aparna is a writer, theatre producer, and award- winning furniture designer. A popular Spoken Word poet, she performs at events across venues in India. Her page poetry has appeared/ is forthcoming in literary journals such as Autumn Sky Poetry Daily, The Visitant, The Same, Leaves of Ink, The Paragon Journal, Duane’s Poetree, A Writer’s Haven Blog, et al. She lives with her 3-year-old son and husband in Pune, India.

Photograph by Wren Tuatha.

Distance Traveled by Michael Chin

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We watched Brent Barry at face value. Asking who was this white kid who dunked form the foul line to win the Slam Dunk Contest. We were abstractly aware of his pedigree. That his daddy was an NBA legend, his older brother a respected two-guard, but put that aside in favor what Brent represented. That the way he cruised to the basket, he looked like he could have started from farther back than the free throw line. I said the first guy to dunk from the three-point line would win the Dunk Contest for sure, and Vinnie nodded along, because we didn’t yet have a sense of the limitations of anatomy. We believed in three-point dunking not as wild speculation and fantasy, but as real possibility, maybe even an inevitability of our lifetimes.

And Vinnie, he took Brent Barry’s dunk and applied it to taunts from the boys at school who called him short and called him pudgy. The boys who laughed when he couldn’t catch net when we all ran and leapt, seeing how high we could reach on a basketball hoop.

“I’m going to dunk,” Vinnie said.

I didn’t believe him. No one did. The difference was I wanted it to be true, and thought maybe he could pull it off. We’d grown up on Hulk Hogan body slamming Andre the Giant, Daniel Larusso crane kicking Johnny into next week, Luke Skywalker bullseyeing womprats in his T-16. We learned to believe in the power of hard work and the reality of chosen ones.

In the years to follow, I sat on the steps outside Vinnie’s house while he did calf raises. Calf raises while we debated the finer points of who was the hottest girl in our junior high. Calf raises while I read chapters of To Kill A Mockingbird aloud so we could both know what happened, calf raises while we sipped not Mountain Dew, but Diet Mountain Dew.

Body squats while we watched NBA Inside Stuff and The Knicks play the The Lakers.

Then he stopped.

Vinnie introduced a new philosophy over a bag of sour cream and onion potato chips. “It’s the ability to do something that matters,” he said. He referenced the scientific system he’d set up on his bedroom wall alongside the plastic basketball hoop. A strip of masking tape he’d applied at his highest jump before he started working toward dunking, a foot from the ceiling. Another from the week later, an inch higher. “If I keep going, I’d be dunking by summer. Easy. I just don’t want to.”

There was an impeccable quality to the argument, or perhaps just to the confidence with which he made it, and yet infuriatingly imperfect about the logic. The logic he’d apply to not trying out for the JV, let alone varsity squads in high school. To the colleges he didn’t apply to and the women he didn’t ask for digits from at our college bar.

We didn’t re-watch video of Brent Barry for long, after it was clear he wouldn’t become a superstar, least of all after Vince Carter went three-sixty into a windmill jam, went between his legs, started from behind the backboard. Not sheer distance traveled, but acts of athletic ingenuity. Imagination.

The truth is, Vinnie stopped watching basketball much a couple years later. Got stuck in time on his basketball knowledge, and when we caught a Warriors game one Christmas, was quicker to recognize Steve Kerr, one time point guard, now one the sidelines as coach, rather than Steph Curry, top-five player of his day, budding superstar, world champ and world beater.

We didn’t talk about Brent Barry, but he brought up Vince Carter, frozen in his rookie year, all potential and power. “He may have been the best dunker of all time.”

 

 

 

Michael Chin was born and raised in Utica, New York and his hybrid chapbook, The Leo Burke Finish, is available now from Gimmick Press. He won Bayou Magazine’s Jim Knudsen Editor’s Prize for fiction and has work published or forthcoming in journals including The Normal School, Passages North and Hobart. He works as a contributing editor for Moss. Find him online at miketchin.com or follow him on Twitter @miketchin.

Until You Could Not Tell Them Apart by Devon Balwit

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And the wolf leaned over the sleeper,
and the sleeper slept, wrapped

in his breathing. His hide became
her blanket, cushioning where

thigh met thigh and breast, breast.
The sleeper dreamed

of the prick of claws, of the prick
of a prick, and blood

rushed to her cheeks and to where
blood rushes, and she

sighed. The wolf panted, and she,
also. And the wild night

streamed light, the wolf riding it,
buoyed by a wildness

wild as his own. They were both
and singular, wolf and sleeper,

they curled into one another until
you could not tell them apart.

 

 

Devon Balwit is a writer/teacher from Portland, OR. She has five chapbooks out in the world. Her poems have appeared in Rattle, The New Verse News, Poets Reading the News, Redbird Weekly Reads, Rise-Up Review, Rat’s Ass Review, The Rising Phoenix Review, Mobius, What Rough Beast, and more.

Nascence by Aparna Sanyal

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All limbs right now,
you feel like a tender grasshopper
A daddy long legs,
lime green, supple, raw;
even your leg rubs are squeaks.
And it feels like the garden mocks
your noise, your silences, even
the pauses you take to exhale.
Your breath is timorous with
fraught expectations. Your disappointments have turned the bush
you hide in,
to a nut- brown shade;
with leaves of crimson, that blush
your growing pangs away.
Each day these leaves fall, litter the ground in tear shapes and we,
who bend to sweep,
weep at their fallen grace.
You’re a creature that sleeps the
day away, unless awakened,
and comes out to play with
curly lashed smiles at night.
In the safety of darknesses and corners you’ve
carefully spun, you reveal your shades-
shy librettos and candied tenors,
tender contraltos that melt away like
treacle.
You allow lightning quick glimpses of your soul between gulps and nervous titters,
then hop away to hide
and build
for the coming day.
Such exquisiteness you have, such
tender vividity, it bleaches my soul
with its incandescence.
But you cannot see it.
Not yet.
For that, you have to wait.
Your time is nascent-
It waits with me, eagerly counts down,
to your
eventual unfurling.

 

 

An MA from Kings College, London, Aparna Sanyal is a writer, theatre producer, and award- winning furniture designer. A popular Spoken Word poet, she performs at events across venues in India. Her page poetry has appeared/ is forthcoming in literary journals such as Autumn Sky Poetry Daily, The Visitant, The Same, Leaves of Ink, The Paragon Journal, Duane’s Poetree, A Writer’s Haven Blog, et al. She lives with her 3-year-old son and husband in Pune, India.

Afterlife by Gayle Kaune

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When I was a child and had ideas
about religion my father called
me smarty pants. He wanted no
interference to his way of thinking.
Maybe he was right.
I felt no empathy for the wan, tubercular,
desert fathers or others whose strings

were pulled by the Vegas mob.
Only ten, I knew there was an
underworld in my hometown
where people never slept
and mothers wore fishnet
stockings, taught their daughters
to mend the tears.

I can discuss these events — moldy
water recirculated in the swamp
coolers of childhood: My first kiss,
with Joe Spoleto, on his parents’ patio,
under flickering bug lights,
the air we breathed, laced with particles
from tests at Yucca Flats.

These memories like dust storms,
some drift away, some still glow:
Father’s photo on the front page
of the Review Journal, his face bruised,
beat up in the desert one night by crooks;
Mother winning a mink stole,
wearing it over a dress that flamed
her cleavage with rhinestones.

 

 

Gayle Kaune has been published widely in literary magazines including Poet and Critic, Crab Creek Review, Seattle Review, Milkweed Editions, South Florida Poetry Review, and Centennial Review. She has won several Washington Poets Awards, a Ben Hur Lampmann award, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her book, Still Life in the Physical World, was published by Blue Begonia Press; her latest, All the Birds Awake, is available from Tebot Bach. She also has two chapbooks: N’Sid-Sen-Star and Concentric Circles, which won the Flume Press Award. Her latest manuscript, Noise From Stars, is looking for a home.

Oracle’s End by J.P. Dancing Bear

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Edvard Munch, At the Roulette Table in Monte Carlo, 1892.

Oracle’s End

Truth, like love, has no winners.

This is why you never see
Casandra at the crap tables
calling out for snake eyes.
The old witches gathered around
the roulette table, their one eye,
bouncing and knocking into one slot
after another, as the wheel slows,
as fate is known.

No, Nostradamus did not catch a ship
to America, never opened a book shop
right off of Main Street. No kids
to legacy. No fortune in untold tales.

And even though there a jail cells,
there’s caldron with bones
that roil and roll from the trick of heroes,
even when the random bullet leaves its war
and finds a collateral skull,

truth, like love, has no losers.

 

 

J. P. Dancing Bear (Featured Poet, October, 2017) is co-editor for the Verse Daily and Dream Horse Press. He is the author of fourteen collections of poetry, most recently, Cephalopodic (Glass Lyre Press, 2015), and Love is a Burning Building (FutureCycle Press, 2014). His work has appeared or will shortly in American Literary Review, Crazyhorse, the DIAGRAM and elsewhere.

On the Occupy Savannah by Wren Tuatha

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Intestines in trees and the births
of stars. These are my witnessings

on the Occupy savannah. So much brutal
beauty and belly breathing I can’t digest.

It’s a giraffe in traffic,
can’t get out of her own way.

And even with this stuck flow
Wall Street should be very afraid.

A giraffe in traffic is not on the payroll,
not towing your barge, not plugged in.

And a giraffe in traffic has
everyone’s attention.

 

 

Wren Tuatha’s poetry has appeared or is upcoming in The Cafe Review, Canary, Peacock Journal, Poetry Pacific, Coachella Review, Arsenic Lobster, Baltimore Review, Pirene’s Fountain, Loch Raven Review, Clover, Lavender Review, Autumn Sky Poetry Daily, and Bangalore Review. She’s the founder and editor of Califragile and also an editor at PoetryCircle. Wren and her partner, author/activist C.T. Lawrence Butler, herd skeptical goats on a mountain in California.

Two Poems by Seth Jani

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Aftersong

Somedays the music helps you
Die a little death.
Mortis harmonious, and the stars
Rain extravagances, forming beads
Of light at the house’s edge.
We attend our silences
Until they swell with a second coming.
God or bird, or simply the flesh
Of soundwaves themselves,
We travel the river straight
To the instrument’s center.
The long diminuendo
Cascades into nothing.
Birds ignite the morning trees.

Eclipse

You open your eyes and are no one.
This is the way both life and death occur.
In between, the construction happens:
The jobs and personalities,
The yellow stone you call a god.
But sometimes, you might remember.
The wind blows through you,
The flowers bloom and diminish,
Happiness and suffering
Wax and wane.
You smile nonchalantly
While the night strings
The street in omens.
You don’t need to read the cryptographs,
The images stars paint
On the peeling wall.
It’s ok to just be a witness.
The sea is nearby,
The wharves full of echoing bells.
A stranger passes.
A great, orbiting moth
Covers the moon.

 

 

 

Seth Jani currently resides in Seattle, WA and is the founder of Seven Circle Press . His own work has been published widely in such places as The Chiron Review, Pretty Owl Poetry, El Portal, The Hamilton Stone Review, Hawai`i Pacific Review, VAYAVYA, Gingerbread House, Gravel and Zetetic: A Record of Unusual Inquiry. More about him and his work can be found at sethjani.com.

I Believed in Magic by Michael Chin

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When Earvin Johnson announced he was HIV positive, it sounded like a death sentence.

That is, unless you believed in magic.

For though he wore neither the purple nor gold of the Lakers, but rather a plain black suit and tie, white shirt, like he was ready for embalmment, and though he announced a retirement effective immediately, he was still Magic. Still a champion, an MVP, an all-star. Still Showtime.

I believed.

Same story, different year, different world when Claudia told me she’d been seeing another man. That she wasn’t seeking forgiveness. She didn’t knead a dish towel like she had when she told me she couldn’t have kids, didn’t eye the spaces between wood panels on the walls like when she scraped the side of my Civic.

Looked me dead on. Hands holding mine. Nothing up her sleeve. Told me we were done.

I believed.

Believed in the Magic who came out of retirement for one outing, 1992, Orlando. The All-Star Game. One more round with the rest of the best and walked out the king of kings. Twenty-five points, the last three when he drained a buzzer beater from behind the arc. Most Valuable Player one last time.

Claudia told me I could keep the apartment. She’d find another place.

We’d moved to Crescent City out of compromise. After coming out west on her command, after the Bay Area proved too expensive. Crescent City kept us in driving distance for weekend trips, and let us breathe that Redwood air. A place to call home until one of us got a break, until things got better.

Magic played for the Olympic team, too. The original Dream Team with Michael and Larry and Charles. Won again. Another trick.

Claudia Left. Took the pots and pans. All the furniture we’d bought since college. Left me the futon from my senior year apartment with the busted frame, so it only folded out to two-thirds length. A closet full of old basketball jerseys, categorized in alphabetical order, from when I dropped money on such things, ranging from Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf’s Nuggets one to Jason Williams from the Kings. In varying degrees of collecting dust. Of decay. Age old orange crust on the collar of Anfernee Hardaway’s Orlando jersey. Number one.

The Orlando Magic.

I believed.

So I cashed in my vacation time and hit the road solo, east bound for Springfield, Massachusetts. A city I’d never seen, but the place where they say Dr. James Naismith first nailed peach baskets over a gymnasium floor. Where the magic started with teenage boys bouncing soccer balls, a gym class activity that became something.

Presto change.

Magic Johnson played point guard most of his career. But his rookie season, last game of the Finals, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar on the DL, Magic started at center. Caught the ball and faked a shot, only to drive as far as the foul line and soared, his best imitation of Jabbar’s sky hook, hitting nothing but net.

Now it’s my turn to drive.

To believe again.

 

 

 

Michael Chin was born and raised in Utica, New York and his hybrid chapbook, The Leo Burke Finish, is available now from Gimmick Press. He won Bayou Magazine‘s Jim Knudsen Editor’s Prize for fiction and has work published or forthcoming in journals including The Normal School, Passages North and Hobart. He works as a contributing editor for Moss. Find him online at miketchin.com or follow him on Twitter @miketchin.

In Consideration of Things Seen or Only Felt by Devon Balwit

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Approaching sirens wail, but I examine
glistening stonefly larva, balled

in an open palm, and a regal moth coif, elaborate
as any contessa’s. I count

the feathers of a barred owl’s wings,
for a moment shielded

by their spread blessing. I know the fate
of this and every other poem

having recently wandered the stacks
of the largest bookstore in my town,

pitying the slim volumes huddling
for warmth, each orphaned darling.

Better to consider the crystalline perfection
of snowflakes delivered

by the same technology that pinpoints
airstrikes but cannot spare

noncombatants, or to lose myself
in the archives of the surrealists,

a preserve for insomniac dreams,
the meticulous obsessions of three a.m.

As covertly as a masturbator, I pour over
Paphiopedilum and Phalaenopsis,

blossoms spread like blood-swollen privates—
all of this, species and souls,

evanescing, as it would even were the State
benevolent, and the earth not wheeling

at 1,550 km/hour, spinning skin into crepe,
bones into spun-sugar filigree.
 
 
 
Devon Balwit is a writer/teacher from Portland, OR. She has five chapbooks out in the world. Her poems have appeared in Rattle, The New Verse News, Poets Reading the News, Redbird Weekly Reads, Rise-Up Review, Rat’s Ass Review, The Rising Phoenix Review, Mobius, What Rough Beast, and more.

 

 

Two Poems by Kierstin Bridger

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Photo by D’Arcy Norman.

Flight Plan Interrupted

I often guess at names for towering clouds,
walk Wonder and Preconception on separate leashes,

try to picture where the other shoe has dropped
or where it dangles somewhere barely holding on.

Skyscrapers are nothing seen from the window
of our Cessna. Flat planes of gray concrete stuck to the land.

Never mind their stories, their poetic sighs
elevated and numerated from within.

Yet here I am floor 7, room 728 remembering
their silent geometries as I watch the citizens below

in matchbox cars and other combustibles
(addictions and intentions invisible

save for the wink of turn lights and the curl
of smoke slipping out thin window cracks).

From this vantage I can’t see the red satin slipper
we passed a half an hour ago.

The shoe was not without sex appeal
the mystery of abandon— one thin strap,

told tongue-tied tales of a date gone bad—
maybe a pilot, a cad, and some fresh rose

scented with vanilla and musk
dabbed behind her ears.

Too much tequila—too much, too fast—
details more mundane than sublime.

It seems whether aloft or on sidewalks,
Scuff and Speculation are the only dogs I know.

 

Snapchat/Snapshot

The soft hair of a mule deer
floats inside the open window sill
without notice.

There is no mesh screen, only a boy
entangled in his bedsheets,
a thin phone glows in his hand.

He takes photos of himself
naked torso, profile in shadow.
The ambient stillness of lamplight

is kind to his face
which is broken out but only a little.
He is thinking about the girl

across the country.
It is still early evening for her.
Dishes just cleared from her California table,

olives poured back into the jar, bottles
slick with sweat, glisten near her head.
She has stood so long in light of the icebox—

an old fashioned word
for a new and not so knew time— an hour
has slipped past without making a sound

save for the cool thermal hum.
The boy and the girl
exchange images over and over.

Her face tilted, filter of cartoon:
doe spots, lips parted in half pout
while his eyes grow heavy with sleep.

Outside an animal folds its legs into the sage,
tucks his new velvet prize in moonlight
and beds down for the night.

 

Kierstin Bridger is a Colorado writer and author of the 2017 Willa Award winning Demimonde (Lithic Press, 2016) and All Ember (Urban Farmhouse Press). Winner of the Mark Fischer Poetry Prize, the 2015 ACC Writer’s Studio Award, an Anne LaBastille Poetry Residency and short-listed for the Manchester Poetry Competition in the UK, Bridger is both editor of Ridgway Alley Poems and Co-Director of Open Bard Poetry Series. She co-hosts Poetry Voice with poet Uche Ogbuji. Find her current work in Prairie Schooner, December, and Painted Bride Quarterly. She earned her MFA at Pacific University. Kierstinbridger.com.

#GunViolence: Columbine by Dana Bloomfield

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I experience this through John.
My widower friend enters my office,
back from his coffee break
with breaking news
that fifteen lay dead in a Colorado school.
Hostages, bombs, mountains, columbine.
I let his face tremble
and his voice sway dizzy, heavy wonder.
I am his quiet anchor, How tragic…
Columbine High School.

Yesterday, radio rhetoric argued
that American education doesn’t prepare
children for the global marketplace.
Glazed-over American eyes turn away
from Kosovo’s blue light hum
to tremble, sway dizzy,
learn late what it’s about.
I survive this onslaught.
I have John for a human shield.

 

Dana Bloomfield is a retired preschool teacher. Her poems have appeared in Baltimore Review, Digges’ Choice, Baltimore Women’s Times, Green Revolution, and the anthology Grease and Tears.

Music Hath Charm by Jack D. Harvey

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Sweetbody told me
that in the Republic
of Mars
surgeons operate
not with scalpels
in their mitts but
with musical instruments-
can this be true?
The ragged edges of
make-believe are
strained by that metal.

Who can’t see the
trumpeting surgeon
blowing an abdomen open
with the brass,
or the piccolo twiddling
away the cerebellum?

What fancy irritations
for the bemused patient.

Locked in death,
the corpse is a feast
of sound;
the human recovery
a triumphal procession.

Death allegro,
life andante.
Maybe on Mars
concerts are swashbuckling
events,

redder than the planet itself.

 

 

Previously Published in Indiana Review.

 

 

Jack D. Harvey has been writing poetry since he was sixteen. He lives in a small town near Albany, N.Y. He is retired from doing whatever he was doing before he retired. Jack D. Harvey’s poetry has appeared in Scrivener, Mind In Motion, The Comstock Review, The Antioch Review, Bay Area Poets’ Coalition, The University of Texas Review and a number of other on-line and in print poetry magazines over the years, many of which are probably kaput by now, given the high mortality rate of poetry magazines.

Two Poems by Victoria Crawford

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Angel Autumn

Oranges, scarlets and golds
burst across the Southland,
mobs of Fall color,
to match my mother’s calendar
as the year and pages grow thin.

SoCal unique autumn benefits,
nightly news touted catalog,
for the encircling mountains
of Ciudad de los Angeles:
clearance for spring of
fragrant manzanita, oily chaparral,
wildlife has more open space,
hi-temp seed germination.
Jerky cameras display flamed brilliance
climbing against the stars,
up the Angeles Crest.
Pine and oak torches dance on hilltops.

Angelino child, I stand in my front yard
and wonder about California seasons.
The radio told us it was
carelessness or intentional,
or an Act of Nature like auto
insurance called it
when our car hit a deer.
I watch the oranges, scarlets, and golds
on the horizon and stick out my tongue
to taste drifting ashes.

 

 

Cypress Years

A kid scrabbles up gray boulders,
forsaking mother’s sedate path.
Plaque is read, for my inattention,
detailing two centuries of life
for Pebble Beach’s Lone Cypress.

Among towered stones, she dwells
in the house of adversity
between typhoon winds and melon
sunsets crimped on the horizon.
I grip her coarse bark, smelling
the sour of decayed aspirin.
Chains upright like crutches hold her
in place— fun for my swinging,
until mother warns me off
to tide pools below Madame’s feet.

My own children rock scramble,
probing tide pool short lives:
sea urchin, star fish, and sculpin.
Park bench suits grandma and me.
We admire the tenacity
of Lone Cypress from forty feet
fenced to secure safety from
tourist feet and arson.
Scorched, a twisted arthritic
fist stabs at heaven,
immobile and eloquent,
Cypress persists. We change

and I push my mother up
a wheelchair accessible trail
to an inaccessible tree
a last 17 Mile Drive tour.
Soon mother’s dust will waft
to the unseen Western Isles.
How many greats of grandchildren
will see this vibrant tree?

 

 

 

From Monterey, California, Victoria Crawford is a poet passionate about connecting nature and the human experience in words to share with readers. She has been published in Peacock Journal, the Ibis Head Review, Wildflowers Muse, the Lyric Review,
Eastlit, and other magazines, as well as having upcoming work in Canary and Pacific Poetry.

The Truth of the Matter (Revealed in My FB Feed) by Devon Balwit

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The dog has a parrot
perched

on his nose.
He watches

with a single eye,
concerned

by the beak
so close

to ocular jelly.
The dog is trying

to be a sport,
the parrot

only itself,
coy, mugging

for an unseen
master. My own devil

perches the same,
God

looking on.
Perhaps, his stay

will be as brief
as a photo op,

perhaps, a lifetime;
perhaps he will take

an eye. His talons
prick

my bridge.
I look askance.

 

 

Devon Balwit is a writer/teacher from Portland, OR. She has five chapbooks out in the world. Her poems have appeared in Rattle, The New Verse News, Poets Reading the News, Redbird Weekly Reads, Rise-Up Review, Rat’s Ass Review, The Rising Phoenix Review, Mobius, What Rough Beast, and more.

Of Arc by Kierstin Bridger

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Stepping across the threshold
I take a long, smoky pull
from the August dark,
try to memorize dirt and water
all that holds me on this blue orb
every boy I met at midnight
every car I pushed down the road
revved like thunder
leaned into bend and turn
to escape the rearview
bridges snapping
rope and board
peripheral flickers of constellation
bigger than the small grip of control
it took to shut out the lights
lock the door,
secure the privacy settings.

In this brittle haze of nostalgia
I remember another mad man is in charge
but this time I have a child asleep
while I secret this drag.
Listen,
my curated walls are enflamed
my zip code could be nuked
just like that it could be gone.
I have to take off my specks—
what you do before a fight–
My opponent will blur
the way they did for Artemisia
and for Joan.

This is how to stand like a knight
only a slim blade against the dragon
of this time.
Hold my light
I’ll whisper into the legacy of stars
to the wind and crescent moon
handover my glowing ash and lick of flame.
Every uprising takes a curve of trajectory
and a practice run.
Every revolution starts with one woman
turning inward, holding court with herself.

 

 

 

Kierstin Bridger is a Colorado writer and author of the 2017 Willa Award winning Demimonde (Lithic Press, 2016) and All Ember (Urban Farmhouse Press). Winner of the Mark Fischer Poetry Prize, the 2015 ACC Writer’s Studio Award, an Anne LaBastille Poetry Residency and short-listed for the Manchester Poetry Competition in the UK, Bridger is both editor of Ridgway Alley Poems and Co-Director of Open Bard Poetry Series. She co-hosts Poetry Voice with poet Uche Ogbuji. Find her current work in Prairie Schooner, December, and Painted Bride Quarterly. She earned her MFA at Pacific University. Kierstinbridger.com.

Photograph by JiNKY Lin

Herons by Martin Willitts, Jr.

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herons take off
like white sheets after making love
stirring ancient machinery
making a haunting sound
delivering reams of light

I find abandoned nests
like drawers
empty of silverware

 

 

Martin Willitts, Jr. is a retired Librarian. He is the winner of the 2014 Dylan Thomas International Poetry Award and Rattle Ekphrastic Challenge, June, 2015, Editor’s Choice. He has over 20 chapbooks including the winner of the Turtle Island Quarterly Editor’s Choice Award, The Wire Fence Holding Back the World (Flowstone Press, 2017), plus 11 full-length collections including Dylan Thomas and the Writing Shed (FutureCycle Press, 2017) and Three Ages of Women (Deerbrook Editions, 2017).

The Oracle of Warranties by J.P. Dancing Bear

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The Oracle of Warranties
“Duh! Winning!” — Charlie Sheen

Everyone will tell you to take responsibility

for your actions

and your inactions

but I’ve seen what happens

the punishments and sentences

who does the right thing?

In baseball the saying goes: “if you’re not cheating

you’re not trying hard enough.”

Why don’t we live like utility players?

Why not cut-up and dishonor the contracts

of society?

Like here there are a lot of killers,

we have a lot of killer—

we are like a nation of killers.

You think we’re so innocent?

They came to me with illegal information

—who wouldn’t use this?

What am I a Boy Scout?

No. I hire boy scouts to make me look good.

I told you everything

you ever wanted to hear—

sold it to you buyer beware.

So don’t come back now

crying about the fake warranty.

I could see all of you coming!

I closed up shop,

I moved beyond the border wall

to state with no extradition

and the loveliest nesting dolls

—you might care to look me up—

we could make a deal!

I know people

who know people.

 

 

 

J. P. Dancing Bear (Featured Poet, October, 2017) is co-editor for the Verse Daily and Dream Horse Press. He is the author of fourteen collections of poetry, most recently, Cephalopodic (Glass Lyre Press, 2015), and Love is a Burning Building (FutureCycle Press, 2014). His work has appeared or will shortly in American Literary Review, Crazyhorse, the DIAGRAM and elsewhere.

Testimony by Rae Cobbs

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Georgia O’Keeffe, Black Lava Bridge, Hana Coast No. 1.

When did I first see it? In a pool of black, bobbing children
collected in the only swimming pool, desert town, summer,
where the heat hit like an explosion when you opened the door.

What did you do? We left.

When did I first feel it? At 2:30, crammed with other students
at the entrance to the buses. Someone threw a cherry bomb
directly at a crowd. One girl before me howled in pain, her leg
a raw exposure of her vulnerability.

What did you do? I ran to her and held her tight.

What evidence did you have of wide injustice? Every black student that I met
was starched and scrubbed so that their mother’s hands were worn on their faces. Each one
excelled as though only ultimate success was good enough.

I taught. I read. I listened. And I loved.

What mistakes have you made that contributed to the problem? I accepted
the attention that came cheaply, satisfied to be a white girl causing it.

What changed your mind, and your ways? It may have been the teacher that I loved
who took me close into his mind but never violated my trust.

What was the essence of that experience? I learned that one need we all share
is to love and respect ourselves. I learned that you can read this in a person’s eyes.

How did this change you, individually? After error, there can be redemption. I saw
power in the act of recognition.

How did this affect you? An unwanted pregnancy became my reason for being.

What were your main obstacles? My parents feared that we would not be accepted.

What did you decide in response? My son was beautiful; it was the world’s problem to accept.

How have your concerns played out in your personal life? I have watched people grow, sometimes after much distress. All of my children live in a varied and indivisible world.

What can you do, now? Testify and love.

 

 

Rae Cobbs is a Californian made into a Kentucky keeper. She has been writing and teaching since she came to Louisville, Kentucky, over half her life ago. Through poetry, she keeps in touch with the physical world, the desert, which she misses, and her own life. Her poems carry the weight of the personal, social, and political changes that are being wrought. She lives in Louisville, Kentucky, with her partner and a house full of four-leggeds. She has twice been a recipient of a grant from The Foundation for Women.

Three Poems by James Croal Jackson

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Mud

or is it clay or is it ghosts I remember
muddy footprints you walking in from
rain white plate of cookies in sweat-palms
mud on floor you said sweet, sweet, sweet,
sweet children all those black nights the salty
wind knocking its way in through shut
windows the dead flowers in vases
received sunlight their daily bread
give us ours the ramshackle trinity of unclean
dishes filthy hands and the sticky fridge door
which wouldn’t open not for you
and certainly not for us

 

Horoscope – July 16, 2017

So, so many projects to complete
before the deadline, Taurus!

How is your pressure? Blood?
Tire? Determination will drive you

to your office parking lot, and there,
in circles, you’ll run out of gas.

 

Models

You cut my face
from a magazine,
pulled tanner grass
in L.A.– how you
lose your sense
of color with nothing
but blue sky and sun
and sidewalk cigarette
stains, everyone dead
in their own way.

 

 

James Croal Jackson is the author of The Frayed Edge of Memory (Writing Knights Press, 2017). His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in FLAPPERHOUSE, Yes Poetry, Serving House Journal, and elsewhere. He edits The Mantle. Find him in Columbus, Ohio or at jimjakk.com.

A Thank You Note by Catie Marie Martin

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Dear – ,

Thank you so much for the sparkling wine glasses,
what beautiful additions to our cabinet they will make!
Thank you for the darling yellow apron, which curtails
my waistline, which kisses my kneecaps in the kitchen.

Thank you for the cantaloupe, the rounded rhododendron
of fruits. Thank you for unclaimed baggage, for forgotten
bank accounts, for the whittled souvenir badger that peers
over my dashboard. I appreciate the first draft of indigo,

the open bar, the fog machine that aggravated my asthma,
the opportunity to wear red cowboy boots. Thank you for
“Sweet Child of Mine.” Please thank your mother for “Jolene.”
I adore the barking black sky, the crestfallen bundle of balloons.

I can’t wait to attempt the Mississippi recipes, the watercress
cucumber salad, the virgin petticoat punch. Thank you for
the shrillness of the morning, the jar of salt that fosters
superstition, the cautionary tale of breaking bows at a bridal shower.

I hope you know how much the empty bottles mean to me,
the crystal shards of adolescent remembrance and common
enemies; the chalky railroad stones, the radish blossoms.
I appreciate your to-and-fro, your plus-one, the arithmetic

of a waltz, your readiness to share crossword puzzles
in Gorges State Park from the backseat. See you soon –
tell the holes in your coat pocket I said hello, and give my love
to the paper mache volcano, in spite of its refusal to erupt.

Sincerely –

 
Originally from Birmingham, Alabama, Catie Marie Martin is currently a student at Brooklyn Law School in Brooklyn, New York. She received her BA in English from Mississippi State University, where she worked as the poetry editor for the school’s literary magazine, The Streetcar, as well as the managing editor for the student newspaper, The Reflector. Catie Marie’s poetry has previously been published in The Streetcar and in the University of Illinois’s Ninth Letter.

 

Photo by Dirk Ingo Franke.

The Really Bad Stuff by Howie Good

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The whole night it was slam, bang, boom. It bubbled up from the doors, seeped in from the windows. You just looked around and saw things were totally gone. It’s like a tornado went in and swept everything up. I was shocked. I didn’t think it would happen. They told us to keep inside, to be ready for anything. It’s had me spooked for years. Now we’re also worried about our houses blowing up. You know how they say you hear the train noise? I heard it.

*

I’m really having a hard time understanding today right now. Dave put a shotgun to his chest so we could study his brain. I didn’t like him staring at me. He often talked to himself. Now we’re kind of like: How do we know if he was telling the truth or not? I’m not a big fan of dialogue. What I fill it with will only be known when it comes spilling out. People are left wondering if it’s going to be a disaster. There will be others out there who will make connections we haven’t seen. To be honest, we just cook bacon and eggs. But sometimes you need bacon and eggs.

*

I’ve seen the really bad stuff on television. But actually experience it? No. Never. I’m not used to this. What might make sense in one place might not in another. Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God. Everything is thrown everywhere. We don’t have anything to stop it. I just feel so sad and empty. At one point I couldn’t see for about five minutes. You press a button, an alarm goes off. A lot of laughter, crying, yelling, tears. They’re laughing at us, every one of us. I don’t care what they do as long as fire doesn’t start coming out the windows.

*

There’s a lot of screaming and praying to Jesus. I guess I’m confused about why this scene. I come and I go and I come and I go. It all depends on the path. I don’t know where I am. I don’t know where we’re going to sleep tonight. I just know it’s totally different from before, when you could get killed for a pair of sneakers. Some people are trembling. I’m composing, if not music, sounds like waves on the beach or perhaps wind in the forest. Do you realize how dangerous that is? I dream of standing ovations.

*

It’s important to test during the day whether or not you’re dreaming. I had a dream and then I turned on the lights and discovered that I had blood all over me. I don’t ever want to forget the shock of that discovery. We’re recreating it with historical obsession and mesmerizing detail. The school there is full of dead bodies. First thing Monday morning, I want to find out why. Anything can happen: I take more medicine than I should; there’s a bloody knife on the bed; they burn the man to the ground.

 

Howie Good, a journalism professor at SUNY New Paltz, is the author of The Loser’s Guide to Street Fighting, winner of the 2017 Lorien Prize for Poetry from Thoughtcrime Press. He co-edits White Knuckle Press with Dale Wisely.

 

Photo by Tony Webster. Minneapolis Police Department squad cars stand by as City crews demolish and discard demonstrators’ belongings early in the morning on December 3, 2015, following 18 days of protests and occupation, with calls for Justice for Jamar Clark, shot by a Minneapolis Police Officer on November 15, 2015.–Wikimedia Commons

Palest Peach, the Sky Meets Day by Rae Cobbs

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Georgia O’Keeffe, Sunset, Long Island.

You don’t know how it survived the journey,
but you slice it into cornflakes, knowing
you’ll taste summer bounding into fall.
The yellow polar bear against the arctic white
is like the light that accents your dark hair,
now streaked with gray. I remember
being dazzled by the colors dancing all
around your head. I have looked into
lacunas of your eyes, seeking power
that you know is emptiness I fill,
standing under stars, my memory.
Nothing will reflect until I sit down
at the table, see light from the door
tag both your eyes, wet with glory.

In the privacy of thought, what colors
come, sweeping slowly? Does the edge
of darkness seep with rainbows rimmed
for birth? Joan Baez sings, recorded
thirty years ago. I listen, rapt, while she
climbs heaven with her voice,
a rasping turbulence that arches home.
She practiced, so her guitar keeps time
like a river, always catching up,
surpassing expectations. I lay me down
in the curve of cardinal feather, slivered gray.
I succumb to sorrow, though it feels like joy.

 

 

Rae Cobbs is a Californian made into a Kentucky keeper. She has been writing and teaching since she came to Louisville, Kentucky, over half her life ago. Through poetry, she keeps in touch with the physical world, the desert, which she misses, and her own life. Her poems carry the weight of the personal, social, and political changes that are being wrought. She lives in Louisville, Kentucky, with her partner and a house full of four-leggeds. She has twice been a recipient of a grant from The Foundation for Women.

Natural Light by Anna Kander

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The desire to be seen
transforms me.

Slide a mirror to me
under the door,
here in this dark room,
and I will find a way
to flash semaphores.

Previously published in Gnarled Oak.

 

Anna Kander is a writer in the Midwest. Her work has appeared in journals including Snapdragon, I Am Not a Silent Poet, and Social Justice.

Oracle of Confederate Statues by J.P. Dancing Bear

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Oracle of Confederate Statues

1.
To see the future the eye must burn
must experience its mass in two places
must cross dimensions

must love the flame

No one chooses to see
but not see

no one looks fondly upon the future

2.
What’s the use in such knowledge

we have a firm grasp
on myths like old blankets
we wrap ourselves in comfort

let’s not read inscriptions
not tonight by the fires
you’ve carelessly lit

here are the great surrenderers
mounted and pointing stoically
into a battle centuries gone

here once were cannons
and you may still hear the echoes
of the thread-bare and torn dead

and where it should have ended
it did not

These monuments
buried in Ozymandian sand
inscriptions worn
the tired faces warn
men from their hatreds

leave them earthed
and forgotten

now that the world is a better place

3.
you come to me not to see
that which is to come

but here you are
waxing nostalgic over the past

not even your own
but people who died
so long ago their very definition
of human (all humans) should be so different

from your own

4.
Now you fight to continue
to ignore the future
of sand slipping through

whispering truth
does not require your belief
to exist

still, I must open my eyes to this future

whenever yours are closed

 

 

J. P. Dancing Bear is co-editor for the Verse Daily and Dream Horse Press. He is the author of fourteen collections of poetry, most recently, Cephalopodic (Glass Lyre Press, 2015), and Love is a Burning Building (FutureCycle Press, 2014). His work has appeared or will shortly in American Literary Review, Crazyhorse, the DIAGRAM and elsewhere.

 

 

From the Editor: Welcome to Califragile‘s Featured Poet for October, J.P. Dancing Bear! Watch for poems from his Oracle series on Mondays and visit Verse Daily!

Three Poems by Judy Shepps Battle

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Almost Abandoned At Six Years Old

Orange tiger lily grows tall in
cut-down milk container
black soil smells sweet

I planted it
I water it
I love it

but Mom left it
somewhere in Mount Vernon
when we moved to Brooklyn

She also left Noisy
my floppy-eared
cocker spaniel who

loves Kennel Ration
and long walks on
sidewalk grass

She would have left me
but I made sure to
hold her hand.

 

Previously published in The Tishman Review.

 

Not Guilty

Marilyn O and her Catholic
friends chase me home

yell Dirty Jew!
throw rocks

taught by moms + dads
priests + nuns that

I killed Christ

that four-year-old me
murdered their God

How likely is that?

 

Previously published in Anti-Heroin Chic.

 

Lingering
for Joan

she hovers in the nether space
somewhere between life and death
undecided whether to yield or fight

she hovers oblivious to North Star
her only two lovers gone
one to God, the other to New Jersey

she can’t leave
she can’t stay
her body still functions with ventilator

DNR* instruction rescinded when
death came close and breathed icicles
and she remembered how much

she hates the cold
and why she chose Florida sunshine
and weekly visits with the manatees

capturing Kodak moments as they
body surf, barrel roll, and
eat freshwater vegetation.

I too hover in the nether space
waiting for a phone call
from her or about her.

 

Previously published in Foliate Oak Literary Magazine.

 

 

Judy Shepps Battle has been writing essays and poems long before retiring from being psychotherapist and sociology professor. She is a New Jersey resident, addictions specialist, consultant and freelance writer.