About the Author: Kathleen Hellen’s collection Meet Me at the Bottom is forthcoming from Main Street Rag. Her credits include The Only Country Was the Color of My Skin, her award-winning collection Umberto’s Night, published by Washington Writers’ Publishing House, and two chapbooks, The Girl Who Loved Mothra and Pentimento. Featured on Poetry Daily and Verse Daily, her work has appeared in Arts & Letters, The Carolina Quarterly, Cimarron Review. Colorado Review,Massachusetts Review, New Letters, Nimrod, North American Review, Prairie Schooner, Salamander, The Sewanee Review, Southern Humanities Review, Subtropics, The Sycamore Review, Tampa Review Online, West Branch, and Witness, among others. Hellen’s awards include the Thomas Merton poetry prize and prizes from the H.O.W. Journal and Washington Square Review, as well as individual artist awards from the Maryland State Arts Council and the Baltimore Office of Promotion & the Arts.
your fear becomes holy,
your marriage frail. you decide mine will ruin yours.
your sentences pervert scripture. plagiarize what
you believe is real. what you claim to conjure
you want god to believe. if no one else loves you
why should he?
your fear becomes holy, 2amen. let me turn your heads:
jesus never married, had disciples: men.
judas turned against him. jealousy
comes from the bed. if i can’t have you
no one can.
These two poems appear in John Compton’s new book the castration of a minor god, available from Ghost City Press
“the castration of a minor god” is built like a classic opera, composed of many lyric passages full of strange and powerful images cast in words, where dresses of flames mix horrifically with our culture’s dishonesty and secret perversion to cast a searchlight onto earth from the heavens above where this thing called god tells us to love one another, fully, completely, without exception. Compton’s short book of poems answers the implicit and explicit questions that other Book poses. Without apology or fear, anger is met with anger, love with love. While sometimes his metaphors go too far, other times the images created are perfectly beautiful and compelling. This is a book that embraces what was forbidden love and shows the reader the universality of fear, desire, and belonging.
-Fred Dodsworth, Dodsworth Books
About the Author: john compton (b. 1987) is a gay poet who lives in Kentucky. He lives in a tiny town with his husband Josh and their dogs and cats.
Image Credit:Ernst Ludwig Kirchner “Head of Dr. Bauer” (1921) Public domain image courtesy of Artvee.
For Mom
The brother who gave me a kidney
for my transplant sent me an email
telling me not to wear my filthy
Yankee cap to mom’s funeral
out of respect for my mother.
Mom knew how I felt and we grew
closer while I helped take care
of her the nine months before
she died. Besides, she’d hardly
notice lying in her closed casket
and if she did, she’d laugh, shake
her head and pull me in with her
for a hug, ask if Judge homered
in last night’s west coast game
against the Angels. Jaime was a baby
when Dad wanted to kick me out
of the house for hair hanging past
my shoulders and mom kept yelling,
over my dead body, until the next door
neighbors, the ones my other brother
named The Gruesome’s to rhyme
with Newsome, threatened to call
the cops and Dad told them to mind
their own friggin’ business and forgot
all about my hair, me. Jaime never
could guess how much it meant
that mom kept asking about my writing,
the only one in the family who read
my poems and never asked why
I wrote that or told me not to write
this, sometimes reminding me
she was the one who taught me
to read, leaning into her arms,
my leg in its brace, laid flat across
the couch when I couldn’t go
out and play with the other kids
who sometimes called me names,
her finger underlining letters,
pointing out words, making me
repeat sounds, and though she only
met Jesse, the severely autistic son
of the woman I briefly lived with
three, four, times at holiday dinners,
she always wanted to know everything
about him, delighted to hear he spent
his weekend skiing or climbing on every
roller coaster, every whirling scary ride
at the summer fair, not like you Anthony,
laughing again when I nodded yeah,
Jesse still loves ripping books into piles
of thin paper slices, orders chicken fingers,
French fries extra hot any time we eat out,
and then she made me promise to take
care of that kid, now a man, good.
About the Author: Tony Gloeggler is a life-long resident of NYC and managed group homes for the mentally challenged for over 40 years. His work has appeared in Rattle, New Ohio Review, Book Of Matches, Chiron Review, Nerve Cowboy. His most recent book, What Kind Of Man with NYQ Books, was a finalist for the 2021 Paterson Poetry Prize and long listed for Jacar Press’ Julie Suk Award.
Image Credit:Édouard Vuillard “The Artist’s Mother Opening a Door” (1886) Public domain image courtesy of Artvee.
The Bones Know
Mama orders beef shank for soup.
I shuffle small feet on the butcher’s sawdust floor,
wishing for that elusive marbled steak.
Gramma Erzebet and I chop carrots and celery
then quarter the parsnips and turnips.
Dolgozz tovább, Zsuzsu.
Keep working, Suzie.
We watch the flesh bubble from the bones
in her cast iron pot and know
we will have supper for days.
Later, the cats lick slick grey bones
tossed on the yellow and green linoleum.
Come May, Mama and I plant pink impatiens by the porch.
Knees pressed into the newly warm earth,
we discover discarded bones of slain birds and mice.
My bones remember every place I go.
Each taste, touch, smell, sight, and sound,
every memory buried in spongy marrow.
About the Author: Susan Cossette lives and writes in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The Author of Peggy Sue Messed Up, she is a recipient of the University of Connecticut’s Wallace Stevens Poetry Prize. A two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Rust and Moth, The New York Quarterly, ONE ART, As it Ought to Be, Anti-Heroin Chic, The Amethyst Review, Crow & Cross Keys, Loch Raven Review, and in the anthologies Fast Fallen Women (Woodhall Press) and Tuesdays at Curley’s (Yuganta Press).
Image Credit:François Bonvin “Still Life” (1858) Public domain image courtesy of Artvee
At 45
i have no time for rebellion
so i’ll take what comes easily
the sun hanging
over brown grass
like a clenched fist
a broken wine glass
in the sink since february
selling a better story
than any of us
can afford
a wolf spider climbing
a broken down amazon box
like sir edmund hillary
atop some snow covered peak
of desolation & boredom
worn out vinyl
recorded as rain fell on seattle
like the blood of the roman dead
in another lifetime
of raised voices & passionate song
where for a few seconds
we all get to feel young again.
About the Author: John Dorsey lived for several years in Toledo, Ohio. He is the author of several collections of poetry, including Teaching the Dead to Sing: The Outlaw’s Prayer (Rose of Sharon Press, 2006), Sodomy is a City in New Jersey (American Mettle Books, 2010), Tombstone Factory, (Epic Rites Press, 2013), Appalachian Frankenstein (GTK Press, 2015) Being the Fire (Tangerine Press, 2016) and Shoot the Messenger (Red Flag Poetry, 2017),Your Daughter’s Country (Blue Horse Press, 2019), Which Way to the River: Selected Poems 2016-2020 (OAC Books, 2020), Afterlife Karaoke (Crisis Chronicles Press, 2021) and Sundown at the Redneck Carnival, (Spartan Press, 2022).. His work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and the Stanley Hanks Memorial Poetry Prize. He was the winner of the 2019 Terri Award given out at the Poetry Rendezvous. He may be reached at archerevans@yahoo.com.
Image Credit: Chase Dimock “Cactus Patch in Joshua Tree” (2021)
About the Author: Mike James makes his home outside Nashville, Tennessee. He has published in numerous magazines, large and small, throughout the country. His poetry collections include: Leftover Distances (Luchador), Parades (Alien Buddha), Jumping Drawbridges in Technicolor (Blue Horse), and Crows in the Jukebox (Bottom Dog.) In April, Red Hawk published his 20th collection, Portable Light: Poems 1991-2021.
A Year Turned Upside Down
Almost all of fall evaporated
in a flurry of sun. Mayweed’s stars
immobilized by an embarrassment of heat.
Come January, gardenias shot into scent,
clivia burst into a conflagration
of orange. With winter annihilated,
spring spiraled into the disingenuous
sugar of summer, sage withered,
chaparral seethed in a flash of flame.
About the Author: Ruth Bavetta’s poems have appeared in North American Review, Nimrod, Rattle, Slant, American Journal of Poetry, and many other journals and anthologies. She likes the light on November afternoons, the music of Stravinsky, the smell of the ocean. She hates pretense, fundamentalism and sauerkraut.
Cod Flashes
Catch and release
but first, after
the flapping stops,
pull a paint-dripping brush
tight down both
sides of its body.
White to teach
a lesson about survival
to it and
everyone who sees.
Highly visible
through the muck,
it will travel
far south,
far north
hugging the river’s top ice
until the danger has passed.
I am painted white inside,
my muscles only know taught.
Different doctors say
this shouldn’t be happening
to someone my age.
Why so wired
and meditation only makes it worse.
I am counting down.
Cod arrives
at its camouflage destination.
Maybe safe
but ghosts are also white.
Three sheets I layer
to cover the ice,
I too have found a home here.
A red fish fibrillates
inside me.
Seize,
unseize.
With a whimper,
arythma.
If the ghost is me,
if the ghost is which part of me,
fish can fellowship
and compare our woes of white.
Maybe the ghost will be only my mind
and haunting is a boast
of finally free.
But before,
we will sleep
me on these stacked sheets,
the cod, bobbing in the current,
exactly below
my meekly knocking heart.
About the Author: Brian Ed Boies lived by train tracks and transcribed train graffiti and used it as prompts. This poem is from that process. He has been published by the National Endowment of the Arts and in Punk Planet and ZYZZYVA. A story of his was listed as Notable Nonrequired Reading in 2012. He lives in Sacramento with his wife and daughter.
Image Credit: Public Domain image originally from The history of esculent fish London: Printed for Edward Jeffrey [etc.],1794. Courtesy of the Biodiversity Heritage Library.
Armor
A dime
shiny silver
in the pocket
a gold fish
shiny orange
has no memory
a penny
dull brown
by the creek
a tub
shiny metal
full of water
the dime
for emergencies
making a call
the goldfish
for training
to motivate kids
the penny
unused unimportant
left to disappear
the tub
for drowning
whatever is unwanted.
About the Author: LB Sedlacek has had poems and stories appear in “Impspired,” “River Dog,” “Hill Rag,” “Inverse Journal,” and “Iconoclast.” Her short stories “Sight Unseen” and “Backwards Wink” were awarded 1st Place Prose prizes in “Branches Literary Magazine.” For 20 years, she published the free resource for poets, “The Poetry Market Ezine.” LB also likes to swim and read.
Image Credit: Public domain image originally from Goldfish breeds and other aquarium fishes, their care and propagation. Philadelphia :Innes & sons (1908) Courtesy of The Biodiversity Heritage Library
Passion Flowers and Puzzle Boxes
Scientists and poets alike have yet to find
whether certain experimental hybridizations
of radio waves and silver go-go boots in any way
affects the erratic trajectories of UFOs.
Though, they now know that the geometry of fireflies
may have some influence over the delicate symbiosis
of communication satellites, train yards
and Blue Turtle migrations.
However, despite recent controversial reports
there has been no independent confirmation
on whether the random arrangement
of orange blossoms on a city sidewalk,
slick with rain, has any more relation
to the performance of a North Korean
featherweight in the 9th than
a performance of Beethoven’s 9th
by the South Korean Philharmonic does
to the discovery of designs
for a steam-driven engine
written on papyrus.
But, one doesn’t need a steady diet
of coral calcium deposits or subterranean
cold-storage of arcane information
to see that a cracked engine block
is bound, cosmically,
to a crack-baby found
behind a dumpster in an alley
(alive and doing well we’re told),
that beauty-parlor patter is richly infused
with important information regarding escape artistry,
living in the desert, the number “0” AND,
stealing household appliances
(specifically, toaster-ovens, it seems)
and, most importantly,
that a strangely warm winter-breeze
witnessed stirring a light bulb
hanging on the end of a string
will eventually result in a brilliant idea
unfolding like a passionflower or
Chinese puzzle box of infinite digression
somewhere down the integer line
of an, as yet, undetermined causal chain.
About the Author: Jason Ryberg is the author of eighteen books of poetry, six screenplays, a few short stories, a box full of folders, notebooks and scraps of paper that could one day be (loosely) construed as a novel, and, a couple of angry letters to various magazine and newspaper editors. He is currently an artist-in-residence at both The Prospero Institute of Disquieted P/o/e/t/i/c/s and the Osage Arts Community, and is an editor and designer at Spartan Books. His latest collection of poems is The Great American Pyramid Scheme (co-authored with W.E. Leathem, Tim Tarkelly and Mack Thorn, OAC Books, 2022). He lives part-time in Kansas City, MO with a rooster named Little Red and a billygoat named Giuseppe and part-time somewhere in the Ozarks, near the Gasconade River, where there are also many strange and wonderful woodland critters.
Image Credit: The American flora. v.1 New York :Hull & Spencer,1855. Image courtesy of the Biodiversity Heritage Library
As It Ought To Be 