Author: asitoughttobemagazine

John Grey: “An Emergency Somewhere”

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An Emergency Somewhere

Sirens wailing,
an ambulance rips a hole in afternoon silence.

The ceramic horse on the mantel had a stroke.
The decanter on the kitchen table was assaulted.

You’re clutching your stomach.
I press my hands to my head.

But the ambulance passes by,
the sound fades in the distance.

There’s no emergency
in what we have.
Just contentment,
as always.

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About the Author: John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident, recently published in Orbis, Dalhousie Review and Connecticut River Review. Latest book, “Leaves On Pages” is available through Amazon.

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More By John Grey: 

Move On

Downsizing

Maud

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Image Credit: Chase Dimock “New Mexico Plains” (2021)

Jason Baldinger: “these blue veins (for lilly portage)”

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these blue veins (for lilly portage)

there’s a copy
of leaves of grass
aging in the back window
of my saturn, cover now
sunbleached, dog-eared
torn, well toned
with car windows down
pages wriggle free
to blow in the wind
of interstate america

I brought walt along
for ceremony in 2012
on day two of 75
cross country travels
getting down to the real
america wherever

on morning two
with reverend copilot
in that green corner
neighbor of the lake, harliegh cemetery
we read whitman at whitman
while he brushes whisps
of the civil war’s hair

I tramp a perpetual journey
look for the soul in these eyes
this lost nation
looking for myself
in the mirrors of maps
strewn across front seat

walt has traveled with me since
a talisman for luck on these
endless miles where anything
is a moment lost in the weight
of every other moment
where every city fades
in the full throat of the rear view

I can’t count all the small town stars
the fireworks and sunsets
all the loneliness found
across these blue veins

like that years pass
I’m standing in a carwash
vacuuming the saturn
for one last ride
holding this dog-eared
abused talisman

I can’t throw it out
in a trashcan, in the last
of winter’s light even if
it is wholly disposable
it carries weight, o
how sweet the silent backward tracings

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About the Author: Jason Baldinger is from Pittsburgh and looks forward to roaming the country writing poems again. His newest books are A Threadbare Universe (Kung Fu Treachery Press) and The Afterlife is a Hangover (Stubborn Mule Press). A History of Backroads Misplaced: Selected Poems 2010- 2020 (Kung Fu Treachery) is forthcoming later this year. His work has been published widely across print journals and online. You can hear him read his work on Bandcamp and on lp’s by The Gotobeds and Theremonster.

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More Poetry by Jason Baldinger:

This Ghostly Ambience

It was a Golden Time

Beauty is a Rare Thing

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Image Credit: Digitally altered photo of Walt Whitman. Public Domain.

Imran Boe Khan: “A Thousand Miles from Your Bedside”

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A Thousand Miles from Your Bedside

I’ve watched you lose life
in measures I cannot grasp.

Distance was the only way to escape
the time loop back to my origin story.

I’d like to say I travelled
to reinvent myself

though I know I just wanted a reason
to not be the one closing your eyes.

They are emissaries from your conscience;
I fear the contradictions they carry.

I have spent my years pursuing an unreachable remoteness,

knowing my life has been yours to roam through
like a mother tasting her own poisoned milk.

While I cower beneath a son’s first day at school,

a daughter’s graduation party, I can feel those eyes
fumbling their ways softly across my face,
lighting a wick beneath the chiselled brow
they cannot read.

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About the Author: Imran Boe Khan has work appearing in places such as the Rumpus, Sixth Finch, Cosmonauts Avenue, Yes, Poetry, and The Bitter Oleander. A previous winner of the Thomas Hardy Prize, Imran is a lecturer at Bournemouth University, and lives in Christchurch, Dorset.

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Image Credit: Broncia Koller-Pinell “A Bedroom Interior” (1895) Public Domain

Ronnie Sirmans: “Cygnus”

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Cygnus

    Homo homini lupus.
    (A man is a wolf to another man.)
                – Latin proverb

We think we are wolves.
I often don’t see the lupine
although I know most of us
can live quite carnivorously.
But the ravenous I admire
comes from the Latin cygnus.
A man is a swan to another man.

Wolves can pull like vicious tides,
while swans push wakes of silence.
Canine hairs scatter like fallen leaves,
while feathers are a welcome snow.
Swans carry a grace of awareness.
Whether ivory or ebony or other hues,
their bodies can iridescently blind us.

A swan is a man is a wolf too.
A man drowned when a swan
protecting his mate overturned
the thin kayak and kept the man
from swimming safely ashore.
Old wives’ tales (and old husbands)
say male swans who are defending
a mate, a nest, or their supposed honor
can break a man’s arm—or his heart.
Swans will hiss. Swans can bite.
You say: but they have no teeth.
Let me tell you, they do, they do.

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About the Author: Ronnie Sirmans is an Atlanta print newspaper digital editor whose poems have appeared in Tar River Poetry, Deep South Magazine, Atlanta Review, The American Journal of Poetry, Fathom, and elsewhere.

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More by Ronnie Sirmans:

Sloughing Words

The Word with the Schwa that’s Really a Short U

Remembering the Great Flood in the Frozen Food Aisle

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Image Credit: Digitally enhanced image from A natural history of birds London :Printed for the author, at the College of Physicians in Warwick-Lane,MDCCXLIII-MDCCLI [1743-1751, i.e. 1750-1776?] Public Domain. Image courtesy of the Biodiversity Heritage Library

Maryfrances Wagner: “Love Should be More Like Yarrow”

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Love Should be More Like Yarrow

One small leaf will speed decomposition
of a wheelbarrow full of raw compost.

Its root secretions activate disease resistance
of nearby plants.  It intensifies

medical action of other herbs, a booster
that enhances the power of others. Meant

to heal, it staunches cuts and wounds, aids
colds, and fevers.  Blood cleanser.  Easer

of toothaches.  Drought tolerant.  Content
to live in pastures, embankments, roadsides,

waste ground, and from a ditch, it waves
to us with its feathery foliage and yellow blooms.

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About the Author: Maryfrances Wagner’s books include Salvatore’s Daughter, Light Subtracts Itself, Red Silk (Thorpe Menn Book Award for Literary Excellence), Dioramas, Pouf, The Silence of Red Glass, and The Immigrants’ New Camera. Poems have appeared in New Letters, Midwest Quarterly, Laurel Review, Natural Bridge, Voices in Italian Americana, Unsettling America:  An Anthology of Contemporary Multicultural Poetry (Penguin Books), Literature Across Cultures (Pearson/Longman), Bearing Witness, The Dream Book, An Anthology of Writings by Italian American Women (American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation), et.al.  She co-edits I-70 Review and served as Missouri’s Individual Artist of the Year for 2020.

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More by Maryfrances Wagner:

Dreaming Through Covid

Losing Cousin Carolyn

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Image Credit: Digitally edited illustration from: Eclogae plantarum rariorum aut minus cognitarum Vindobonae :Sumptibus auctoris, typis Antonii Strauss …,1811-1844. Public Domain. Image courtesy of The Biodiversity Heritage Library

Tony Brewer: “Pity for Sale”

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Pity for Sale
after Ferlinghetti after Gibran

Pity the bee who has no country
its fuzzy swollen appetite
and hardwired love of CANDY
Pity the window gladly accepting
so many waves of heat and hand
fogged with condensation of desire
Pity the vegetable in its untouchable packet
disguised as itty-bitty seeds
that are mere possibilities
Pity the failed backup
and MAKE IT NEW!
Pity the ambulance so lonely
it stalks my next-door neighbor
twice this year alone
Alone
Pity the billionaires in love with zeros
No! fuck those clowns right in the zero
Pity the worker who identifies with a king
Pity the tree dragged down by sweet honeysuckle
the redbuds pinking the woods
telling us it is time
Time
Pity the time it takes to feel
the time it takes to unfeel
to unlearn to unlove to unseal
Pity our ranks and forms
a slot for everyone when we all
would be better off marked OTHER
My country ’tis not insane
but copes horrendously
Sweet land – sweet liberty
ask any busy bee

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About the Author: Tony Brewer is a poet, live sound effects artist, and event producer. He is executive director of the spoken word stage at the 4th Street Arts Festival and president of the National Audio Theatre Festivals. His books include: The Great American Scapegoat, Little Glove in a Big Hand, Hot Type Cold Read, Homunculus, and brand new from Alien Buddha Press, The History of Projectiles. Tony has been offering Poetry On Demand at coffeehouses, museums, cemeteries, churches, bars, and art and music festivals for over a decade, and he is one-third of the poetry performance group Reservoir Dogwoods.

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Image Credit: Digitally altered image from The natural history of insects Perth :Printed by R. Morrison Junior,1792. Public Domain. Image courtesy of the Biodiversity Heritage Library

Larry Smith “Guitar Lesson”

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Guitar Lesson 

My guitar has lost sound
shed like snakeskin
in a desert of neglect.
Wood and strings longing
for touch dry up and
barely whisper their song.

And I beg forgiveness,
shoulder in embrace,
fingertips stroking the pain
into song. Each day,
each hour, each moment
our love revives.

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About the Author: Larry Smith is the editor-publisher of Bottom Dog Press in Ohio, also the author of 6 books of fiction and 8 books of poems, and most recently Mingo Town and Memories: Poems. A retired professor of humanities, he lives and works along the shores of Lake Erie in Huron, Ohio.

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More By Larry Smith:

No Walls

Union Town

At The Country Store

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Image Credit: Juan Gris “Still Life with a Guitar” (1913) Public Domain

Ruth Bavetta: “Spell to Name the Unnameable”

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Spell to Name the Unnameable

Light small fires against the screen
that separates close from distant.
Petition the sea tern to spin the compass,
the horse to silhouette the sky.
Burn mushrooms, magazines,
and mayberries salted with stars.
Balance rainbow upon rainbow
until there is no trace of longing,
no residue of what was lost.
Follow the red clay road
over the hill to an unspecified town
where the houses are unnumbered
and the answer lies buried
under the doorstone. Leave
your footprints leading away.

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About the Author: Ruth Bavetta’s poems have appeared in Rattle, Nimrod, American Poetry Review, Tar River Review, North American Review and many other journals and anthologies. Her books are Fugitive Pigments and Flour, Water, Salt (Futurecycle Press), Embers on the Stairs (Moon Tide Press), and No Longer at This Address (Aldrich Press). She has been a Best of the Net and Pushcart Prize nominee.

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More by Ruth Bavetta:

Wildfire

A Murder

Neon Boneyard

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Image Credit: Chase Dimock “Take Off Sunset” (2021)

Jeremy Nathan Marks: “Edgemere Road”

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Edgemere Road

-for Ruth and Milton in memoriam

When there were pictures
on the wall
the house seemed larger
end tables in the hall
and someone answering
the phone

Telemarketers and fundraisers
would call but now no one does
because mail and bills are forwarded
to next of kin.

I remember both of you
moving from room
to room
creaking floors
and chiming clocks
every one of which spoke
of a particular purchase
or repair
work histories and earnings
wood grain walls
appliance doors grasped with a turning
of plumbing fixtures foot prints in linoleum.

I remember how you fed squirrels
picked beetles off of your plum tree
admired that flaming sugar maple
across the street

You cultivated tomatoes
and were proud to be
the first and only owners
of your house

You paid your bills and cut your grass
did all of the things responsible home owners do
taking a particular joy in your obligations because

They were yours.

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About the Author: Jeremy Nathan Marks lives in Canada. Brand new work appears/is appearing in Unlikely Stories, The Pangolin Review, Every Day Fiction, Bluepepper, Sledgehammer Lit, Ginosko Review, and New Reader Magazine.

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More by Jeremy Nathan Marks:

Plus Ten

Frontiers are Frontiers but Once

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Image Credit: Marion Post Wolcott “Mr. and Mrs. Elvin Wilkins (Rosa) discussing whether or not they will buy this linoleum for their kitchen floor. They decided it was too light and not wide enough and that they would wait. They came to Durham, North Carolina from their farm near Stem, Granville County, to sell their tobacco at auction and to do some general shopping” (1939) The Library of Congress

DS Maolalai: “Circles on a table”

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Circles on a table

driving a car
through the spilled
beer of morning.
tracing your path
in unpleasant
wet city – sleepy
and trying alert –

like dragging
a finger
over circles
on a table
in the garden
smoking patio
at a summer’s
evening party.

waiting
at a traffic
light – a red
flaring cherry –
someone stands
a moment,
lights a morning
cigarette.

next to me
a tram pulls up.
a woman
does her make-up.
uses the window
to see her reflection –
looks straight
at me looking,
doesn’t see me.

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About the Author: DS Maolalai has been nominated eight times for Best of the Net and five times for the Pushcart Prize. His poetry has been released in two collections, “Love is Breaking Plates in the Garden” (Encircle Press, 2016) and “Sad Havoc Among the Birds” (Turas Press, 2019)

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More by DS Maolalai

“The work-horse god”

A Perfume

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Image Credit: Wasilly Kandinsky “Light Circle” (1922) Public Domain