Month: March 2021

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That Cloud Looks Like a Typewriter

In mid-century films, the typewriter
was an extroversion machine, clattering day after day
as if to declare, “I’m not some dream-bound poet

lying back, looking up at the sky,
but a vital cog in the gears of capitalism.
Check out my rising paper stack!”

and on-screen scribblers, prolific
even when spinning their wheels, would toss
wadded sheets, filling trash cans and littering

floors with their blockage,
because back then you could fix any jam
by generating mounds of garbage, not like how

I now burrow into my muted keyboard, private
except for the crowing and sighing I scatter
across social-media sites—no prop could advertise

my steady pecking and writerly pluck here
twixt laptop and couch or the ethereal junkpile
of false starts that’s seeding a cloud.

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About the Author: Sarah Carleton writes poetry, edits fiction, tutors English, plays the banjo, and makes her husband laugh in Tampa, Florida. Her poems have appeared in numerous publications, including Cider Press Review, Nimrod, Chattahoochee Review, Tar River Poetry, Crab Orchard Review, and New Ohio Review. Her first collection, Notes from the Girl Cave, was recently published by Kelsay Books.

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Image Credit: Harris & Ewing, photographer “Woman at typewriter” [between 1921 and 1923] The Library of Congress

(You can view Sage’s painting A Bird in the Room here)

On “A Bird in the Room” by Kay Sage

The year after you died, I refused all fruit.
I could not bear that hybrid of plant and ghost.
By the time a lemon reaches the east coast,
its tree could be in flames.
All that’s left a sour ball,
a seed unwelcome on chicken.

The month you died, I kept the fruit
I found on walks in shadows.
If I can’t have it, no one will.
I stuck them in my rafters,
where darkness transformed them.
Not castration but refuse.

The week you died, I examined pits.
Nectarines, apricots, peaches,
all malformed brains. I had wondered
about mangoes. Under sunset skin,
thick, orange slime. What keeps
their roundness? Can you read braille?

The day you died, there was a bird
in the room. Round and pulsing,
a bird is a kind of fruit. You
can take it apart with your hands.
I think it was looking for a tree
filled with pomegranates or twigs.

I know what the old women say:
If a bird enters your home, a member
of your household will die. I did not know
they meant the spot where all gentleness gathers,
the pit. You have to wonder the causality
and how far back it will go.

The year I refused fruit made me still
inside, the stillness filled our house
with grey. The pits fell out of rotting
bodies. The bird got lost somehow
and invited itself in. I think it killed you,
love, killed you with feathers and legs.

How perverse that you will never go
into the ground, never go to tree.
You’ll fly, little bird, out over the coast.
But I will leave my door open for you
in case you get lost. For you, love,
I’ll fill my home with ash.

About the Author: Nadia Arioli (nee Wolnisty) is the founder and editor in chief of Thimble Literary Magazine. Their work has appeared or is forthcoming in Spry, SWWIM, Apogee, Penn Review, McNeese Review, Kissing Dynamite, Bateau, Heavy Feather Review, Whale Road Review, SOFTBLOW, and others. They have chapbooks from Cringe-Worthy Poetry Collective, Dancing Girl Press, and a full-length from Spartan.

More by Nadia Arioli:

On “I Walk Without Echo” by Kay Sage

On “The Fourteen Daggers” by Kay Sage

Nursing Home Visit in Times of Corona

You must make an appointment by phone.
You must call between ten and three on a weekday.
You may only visit once a week.
You must visit between 1 and 5 pm.
You may not stay longer than one hour.
You must check in fifteen minutes before.

You must fill out a form.
You must wear a face mask.
You must keep a distance.
You must disinfect your hands.
You must walk to the building along the shortest way
you have been directed to use.

You must check in with the nurse.
You must wait if the nurse is busy.
You may not speak with a doctor.
You must make an appointment to call the doctor
by phone if you have questions.

You must check out with the nurse.
You receive a check mark by your name.
You get a green mark if you kept the time limit.
You get a red mark if you overstayed.
If you have a red mark,
you may be denied
further visits.

About the Author: Agnes Vojta grew up in Germany and now lives in Rolla, Missouri where she teaches physics at Missouri S&T and hikes the Ozarks. She is the author of Porous Land (Spartan Press, 2019) and The Eden of Perhaps (Spartan Press, 2020), and her poems have appeared in a variety of magazines.

More By Agnes Vojta:

Legend

Sisyphus Calls It Quits

Flotsam

Image Credit: Chase Dimock “Victoria Leaves” (2019)

About the Author: Frank Gallimore is the creative director of marketing for ZVRS and Purple Communications, a telecommunications company for the deaf and hard of hearing. He also holds an MFA in poetry from Johns Hopkins University and paints in his spare time. A sampling of his art and poetry can be found at frankgallimore.com.  His poetry has appeared in Slate, Harvard Review Online, Unsplendid, Cold Mountain Review, and was featured on Verse Daily.

Image Credit: Chase Dimock “Grover Beach Dunes” (2020)