Before she chose herone new name, she trembled through a dozen baby books. Walked through library stacks and touched every Anna and Sylvia, all the Marianne’s, Eileen’s, and Audre’s. Said each in a slow whisper, elongating vowels into a wish. Now and then, imagined saying the name with a confident rasp. What she wanted was not a mark of winter, but spring’s first colorand the alchemy of change.
Finally, the choice stood out as much as her dark over-tall frame, as much as her cliff-sharp cheekbones. Jacob, her former self, became a passenger on a bus headed to an endless west.
The directions were in the small compass of her hands.
.
About the Author: Mike James is the author of eleven poetry collections. His most recent books include: Crows in the Jukebox (Bottom Dog), My Favorite Houseguest (FutureCycle), and Peddler’s Blues (Main Street Rag.) He has previously served as associate editor for both The Kentucky Review and Autumn House Press. After years spent in South Carolina, Missouri, Pennsylvania, and Georgia, he now makes his home in Chapel Hill, North Carolina with his large family and a large assortment of cats.
Image Credit: “Blue and Green Music” By Georgia O’Keeffe (1921)
I was at work, eating my lunch alone in my classroom—I generally try to avoid the teacher’s lounge and the ubiquity of its gossip hens. With my turkey sandwich in hand, I sat in front of the computer, entering grades, when my gnat-like attention span turned to Jessica, a woman I dated in my 20s and with whom I had my most tumultuous relationship.
I have difficulty believing intimacy between two people simply vanishes, ceases to exist in our thoughts and memories once we’ve moved on, so I have a tendency to tabs on my exes, either through social media or, in some cases, correspondence. Of course, some would rather not have anything to do with me, and that is also fine. As long I know they are well.
With Jess, she disappeared entirely from my life, never showed up again. I found this somewhat unsettling so I ran an Internet search on her name.
I nearly choked on a piece of half-masticated turkey when the results popped up seconds later and knew immediately that I wouldn’t be finishing my lunch.
The first search result was a link to Jess’ obituary.
###
After finishing college, with few prospects for teaching positions on the East Coast, I moved to Las Vegas where I taught high school for a year. The experience unfolded as one might expect the experience to unfold for a 23 year-old man living in a place that celebrates its tireless debauchery. I met Jess, a transplant for California, toward the end of my stay in Sin City.
One night, after taking a tough and ill-advised hit at a blackjack table—a gambler, I am not—I retreated to a bar around the corner from my apartment in North Las Vegas to soak my wounds with my friend, Brad. While lamenting the fiscal fuck-up that would leave me eating straight grilled cheese for a week, I spotted a striking brunette sitting alone across the bar.
“Look at her,” I said to Brad. “She is stunning.”
A gay man, Brad gave her a cursory glance to appease me. “Pretty,” he said. “You should buy her a drink.”
“Why would a girl like that be interested in me?”
“Stop it, Mr. Self-Deprecating,” Brad said. “Besides, how much more can you possibly lose tonight?”
Sometimes the moon comes down (if she happens to be in town) from her royal couch of clouds to drink with us (my shadow and me) when no one else will.
Sometimes the moon rings like a temple bell on a brittle, breathless, freeze-dried night, signaling the beginning (or maybe the end) of something important and radiates with a halo of steam like a luminous ball of dry ice.
Sometimes the moon is a curved dagger that some Bedouin bandit prince might have brandished in the blue and grainy late, late show of my childhood dreams.
Sometimes the moon is a white rose that drunken fools inevitably try to shoot arrows and poems at, knowing full-well that both return to Earth with potentially dangerous results.
Sometimes the moon is a pallid face peering in at us through a Winter window scene while the radio begins to glow with a moody Ellington Indigo and a car down on the street is struggling to clear the early frost from its throat.
Sometimes the moon is a cop’s
flashlight cutting a cautious path through film-noir ghosts of gutter steam.
Sometimes the moon is a 60-watt bulb shining from the back porch, out into the sweaty, firefly-infused, backyard jungle nights of long ago.
Sometimes the moon is a guard tower spot, always trying to catch us with its magic lasso whenever we make our midnight raids, over the walls, into the Garden of Earthly Delights.
Sometimes the moon is a silver dollar that’s been sheared in two by a dull and rusty pair of tin snips.
Sometimes the moon is a shiny dime flattened on a railroad track, in which, if one looks just right, a semblance of Roosevelt’s confident and reassuring smirk can still be seen. Sometimes the moon is a fat, blue androgynous Buddha, grinning out at the universe in every direction at once.
Sometimes the moon is a single bright eye of a dark god of the ancient world, peering down at us through a hole torn in the top of a circus tent of clouds, or up from an inversely alternate underworld through the dimensional portal of a swollen, marshy pond.
Sometimes the moon is nothing more than the moon.
No.
That’s never true.
.
About the Author: Jason Ryberg is the author of twelve 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 bothThe Prospero Institute of Disquieted P/o/e/t/i/c/sand the Osage Arts Community, and is an editorand designer at Spartan Books. His latest collections of poemsare Zeus-X-Mechanica (Spartan Press, 2017)and A Secret Historyof the Nighttime World (39 West Press, 2017). He lives part-time in Kansas City with a rooster named Little Redand a billygoat named Giuseppe and part-time somewherein the Ozarks, near the Gasconade River, where there are alsomany strange and wonderful woodland critters.
Before my brother’s incarceration, I held many beliefs that I now grapple with; one is my once vehement view embracing an eye for an eye, the law of retribution. The idea once seemed simple, if you do wrong, you should suffer an equivalent consequence. The problem is I interpreted this guiding principle through the kaleidoscope of my own limited experience, an experience that did not take life’s complexity or the fallibilities of the justice system into account. The variables are endless, for example just pick up Anthony Ray Hinton’s new book, The Sun Does Shine, which discusses how he survived three decades on death row in Alabama for a crime he did not commit. The number of death row inmates who were set free is absolutely staggering. Then of course, you have to consider mental illness and countless other factors when considering retaliation in lieu of a more magnanimous alternative.
Here’s the thing, I never thought I would be standing on line, shoes in hand, waiting to walk through a metal detector at a maximum-security prison to see my little brother. I never thought I would sit across from someone whom I once knew as the kindest, gentlest person and question every conviction I ever held about him and about all my perceptions. I never thought someone I loved would cause others, including myself, such intense pain by committing an inane act, an act still unfathomable to all affected. Here’s another thing, sometimes you cannot make sense of a tragedy no matter how hard you try. That aside, I want to believe that if you are willing to look at your experiences, even the most painful ones, as opportunities to learn then you will grow as a person and you may even be able to help others along the way. I have to constantly remind myself that good can come from a tragedy, that all is not lost. I use what I know, poetry, as a catalyst for thought and discussion, the chance to make people feel less lonely. I believe poetry is a good place to start any conversation.
I don’t want this poem to be about the death penalty, but it is
After our family’s hamster cannibalized three of her newly born babies, I placed her into isolation, an old tar bucket I found in the garage. I don’t tell my daughter this when she asks if she can get a pet hamster, instead I remind her of the fish she fails to feed and the cat litter I clean. I don’t tell her how I believed in the death penalty when I carried that tar bucket outside, dug a hole in the snow, dropped the hamster in, and buried her alive. I don’t tell her how, shortly after that, my parents called my brother and I to dinner. Remorseless, I scooped a heaping serving of mashed potatoes on to my plate and didn’t notice my brother crying. I almost forgot how he left the table, without explanation, ran outside, dug up the hamster with his bare hands, brought her into his bedroom and rocked her for hours. I tell my daughter to ask her father because I know he’ll say no. He doesn’t want to deal with another caged animal who will eventually be forgotten by everyone except me. I don’t tell her I believed in an eye for an eye until her Uncle, that small boy who cradled that hamster, murdered someone we loved. I remember their tiny pink bodies ripped apart and strewn over the woodchips. I remember thinking what kind of animal could do something so disturbing? They never even had the chance to open their eyes. I tell her to stop begging, but I don’t tell her how our scent on the newborns may have triggered the massacre, how the hamster may have feared a lack of resources, or was in shock after giving birth. My daughter cradles this want in her bones. She asks why not as if there is an answer that will satisfy either of us.
.
About the Author: Rebecca Schumejda is the author of Falling Forward (sunnyoutside press), Cadillac Men (NYQ Books), Waiting at the Dead End Diner (Bottom Dog Press), Our One-Way Street (NYQ Books) and several chapbooks including Common Wages, a joint project with poet Don Winter. She received her MA from San Francisco State University and currently lives with her family in New York’s Hudson Valley. She is a co-editor of the online publication Trailer Park Quarterly.
Image Credit: “Snow Scene” By Bruce Crane. The Metropolitan Museum of Art
“A Marsh Farm” Peter Henry Emerson (1886) courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program.
Farm Near a Bend in River Tummel
By Jeffrey Alfier
Farm Near a Bend in River Tummel
There was a shed here once. If you look close, you can see grass ghosting its outline.
Any tool the day required could be found here. Tack, as well: bits, bridles, a harness or two.
Never mind weather; some days I think decades of dad’s swearing finally brought it down,
his voice burning beams like fire. Rust crumbling from the ledges didn’t help. Neither did I,
backing the Landini loader against its worst wall. My brother and I once set a drowned ewe inside—
it was our fault—we’d left a gate open. Never told dad. He found out, of course. But that was the day
he got word his father died up north, a fall down stone stairs along a Stornoway quay.
Look: there’s two planks left from the door. You can still make out where the lock used to be.
(from The Red Stag at Carrbridge: Scotland Poems Aldrich Press, 2016)
About the Author: Jeffrey Alfier is 2018 winner of the Angela Consolo Manckiewick Poetry Prize, from Lummox Press. In 2014 he won the Kithara Book Prize, judged by Dennis Maloney. Publication credits include Crab Orchard Review, Southern Poetry Review, Atlanta Review, Copper Nickel, Emerson Review, Iron Horse Literary Review, Kestrel, Hotel Amerika, Midwest Quarterly, Poetry Ireland Review and South Carolina Review. He is author of The Wolf Yearling, Idyll for a Vanishing River, Fugue for a Desert Mountain, Anthem for Pacific Avenue: California Poems, Southbound Express to Bayhead: New Jersey Poems, The Red Stag at Carrbridge: Scotland Poems, Bleak Music – a photo and poetry collaboration with poet Larry D. Thomas and The Storm Petrel: Poems of Ireland. He is founder and co-editor at Blue Horse Press and San Pedro River Review. An Air Force veteran, he is a member of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America.
The canyon water ran black, the driftwood ran gray on a day when sky blended into sea a seamless bone.
Slivered ancient trees. Lines around the eyes of wizened faces of locals nearly worn away. Old timber,
sharp to the touch, piled at random discovered at the end of an uneven spider-webbed path.
The lapping of tiny waves announces a boat. A fisherman, a net all the same soft icy hue.
Memory of an air-mail letter, an atlas traced with music softly playing behind in pale yellow rooms. Light candles,
listen to the drone of seaplanes, shorebirds hopping with schedules we do not know. Send books
to houses covered with ancient vines, the purpleness of ground reflected in rot and neglected beams.
You don’t have to tell
her you love her. All
this gray quiet splintered
silence tells her as if the sea
could spell
and you made this place just for her.
.
(This poem original was published in the book Surface Effects in Winter Wind)
.
About the Author: Tobi Alfier (Cogswell) is a multiple Pushcart nominee and multiple Best of the Net nominee. Her chapbook “Down Anstruther Way” (Scotland poems) was published by FutureCycle Press. Her full-length collection “Somewhere, Anywhere, Doesn’t Matter Where” is recently out from Kelsay Books. She is co-editor of San Pedro River Review (www.bluehorsepress.com).
So he puts X=6 on the board, says I’m gonna show you how to figure out this problem and then starts drawing all this other number stuff; then pretty soon he’s back to X=6 at the bottom. So math is like this I think; you remember when the kids all went cruising, into the downtown, around the courthouse, you know, back before the mall. Now when they stopped at a light, they would all get out, run around the car screaming and laughing, get back in when the light turned green. They would of course be in different seats, but it would be the same damn kids in the car; that’s how math works.
.
About the Author: A past winner of the Jim Harrison Award for contributions to baseball literature,Tim Peelerhas also twice been a Casey Award Finalist (baseball book of the year) and a finalist for the SIBA Award. He lives with his wife, Penny in Hickory, North Carolina, where he directs the academic assistance programs at Catawba Valley Community College. He has published close to a thousand poems, stories, essays, and reviews in magazines, journals, and anthologies and has written sixteen books and three chapbooks. He has five books in the permanent collection at the Baseball Hall of Fame Library in Cooperstown, NY. His recent books include Rough Beast, an Appalachian verse novel about a southern gangster named Larry Ledbetter, Henry River: An American Ruin, poems about an abandoned mill town and film site for The Hunger Games, and Wild in the Strike Zone: Baseball Poems, his third volume of baseball-related poems.
pollock paints reflection of the big dipper the sun too bright on saturday afternoon and nothing i say worth believing listen i love you i’m afraid all of these ideas that become empty shells the air cold where it touches my fingers shadows curved sharply up the sides of houses and down all of the meaningless streets i’ve ever lived on and what happens when every country has been carefully defined? why do we care if certain babies are left to die in windowless rooms? i’ve got fences to build
holes to dig and nails to hammer entire days to waste holding objects in my scraped and bleeding hands and does it matter if the war is lost when it’s fought 5000 miles away?
there are those who claim it does there are instances when i’m mistaken for my father when all i can taste are his ashes
the phone ringing in another part of the house while i stumble drunkenly across the bedroom my friends dead or disappeared my letters returned unopened notebook after notebook filled with words scribbled down and then crossed out not poems but prayers not god but religion small moments of illumination that mean nothing in the end
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About the Author: john sweet, b 1968, still numbered among the living. A believer in writing as catharsis. Opposed to all organized religion and political parties. His latest collections include APPROXIMATE WILDERNESS (2016 Flutter Press), BASTARD FAITH (2017 Scars Publications) and the limited edition HEATHEN TONGUE (2018 Kendra Steiner Editions). All pertinent facts about his life are buried somewhere in his writing.
If I try eyes-shut hard;
recall the misty likeness of a stretcher
and air mask, a trailer lined with
ice-fangs in Napanoch, a red ball
I worshipped at three years old.
How your legacy sits in two boxes.
Poor math, crayoned stick-people,
tidy poems you wrote in the 80’s
That are all
formatted
like this.
Pour upon the wording, to have
known you. I scrounge your experiences
to exonerate my own.
The exactness of your malady, father’s
a How-To guide on being in one’s cups.
You get dry in centers and rooms,
found something God-like,
pressed petals between pages,
all piecemealed at my fingertips.
I’m faint praise as a pushing thirty
dry spell. Oh how our quenching throats beg,
didn’t and don’t they?
Pour upon the wording, to
know how. Yet, I’ll remain séance-less.
I’ve found something myself.
How to speak.
TURNCOAT
I put my head on pillow
and wake up with the birds.
When I dream:
I’m adrift in a flowing sea
of rainbow-flavored liquor,
in a boat made from cheap cigarette
cartons, next to a whopper of an impression
of her, who loved my wrong,
who reminds me it’s 2007,
and promises I don’t have
to work tomorrow
or do anything else
ever again.
Today’s poems appear here today with permission from the poet.
Erric Emersony is a poet residing in South Philly, PA. He is a founding member of Duende literary journal for which he also served as poetry editor for the inaugural issue. He’s currently guest editor at Aji literary journal. Erric is a graduate of Goddard College’s Bachelor of Fine Arts Creative Writing program. His first collection, Counting Days, was published in December of 2017. He has published 40+ poems in 20+ magazines including: TL;DR, Crab Fat, The Black Napkin, The Disconnect, FIVE:2:ONE, Beautiful Losers, Prairie Margins, Neon, The Hungry Chimera, Control, Mead: Literature & Libations, Angry Old Man, Rat’s Ass Review, Gingerbread House, Willawaw, and Visitant.
Guest Editor’s Note: Erric Emerson’s poems build mood, feeling, and context by selecting precise details that tell deeply personal and emotional stories. In “Motherless,” Emerson combines distant memories–“the misty likeness of a stretcher / an air mask, a trailer with / ice fangs in Napanoch, a red ball”–with immediate sensations–“how our quenching throats beg”–to link a mother and son. Fragmented recollections from a harsh past and present connect mother and son without resorting to blame or sentimentality, creating a portrait of the two and their relationship both decades ago and today. “Turncoat” recreates a moment of waking when dream and reality combine in a guided wish for unconditional love from “her, who loves my wrong” with the need to escape–“promises I don’t have to / work tomorrow / or do anything else / ever again.” These poems and others in Counting Days are filled with fresh language and harsh realities that create moments and stories filled with deep emotion and angst.
Guest Editor Alan Toltzis is the author of The Last Commandment. Recent work has appeared in print and online publications including Hummingbird, Right Hand Pointing, IthacaLit, r.k.v.r.y. Quarterly, and Cold Noon. Find him online at alantoltzis.com.
A NOTE FROM THE MANAGING EDITOR:
After nearly ten years as Contributing Editor of this series, it is an honor and a unique opportunity to share this space with a number of guest editors, including the editor featured here today. I am thrilled to usher in an era of new voices in poetry as the Managing Editor of this series.
Viva la poesia!
Sivan, Managing Editor
Saturday Poetry Series, AIOTB
The highway to work was longer than usual the first Monday after turning back the clocks.
My watch suggested I slow down. You are not late enough, it said. Daydream some more.
Hood up, hands in his pockets, a boy waited at the end of a driveway by a mailbox.
His jowly fawn boxer sat in charge of watching the other direction for the school
bus, its muzzle and underbelly white as a fence post.
My super vision cut a hole, like a glass on biscuit dough, in the boy’s bag sagging at his feet.
His math homework wore a corsage of purple jelly
thumb prints above the first story problem. If you are traveling fifty miles per hour,
my watch said, and work is fourteen miles away racing toward you a hundred kilometers per hour,
when and where will the train derail? How long does it take the bullet to exit the barrel?
My eyes met the boy’s through the windshield as I passed. He yawned contagiously.
The boxer’s little docked tail bustled up leaves that matched its coat.
.
About the Author: Stephen Roger Powers started writing poetry almost twenty years ago to pass time in the middle of the night when he was too energized to sleep after coming off the stage in comedy clubs around the Midwest. He is the author of The Follower’s Tale and Hello, Stephen, both published by Salmon Poetry. Other work has appeared in 32 Poems, Shenandoah, The Southern Poetry Anthology Volume V: Georgia, Rabbit Ears: TV Poems,and Stone, River, Sky: An Anthology of Georgia Poems. He hasn’t done stand-up in a long time, but every once in a while he finds avenues for the performer he was born to be. He was an extra in Joyful Noise with Queen Latifah and Dolly Parton, and he can be seen if you know justwhere to look.
As It Ought To Be 