Author: Chase Dimock

Chase Dimock teaches Literature and Writing at College of the Canyons. He is the Managing Editor of As It Ought To Be Magazine.

Poetry Soundbite: A Reading and Interview with Bunkong Tuon

Posted on by Chase Dimock

 

 

Welcome to AIOTB Magazine’s second Poetry Soundbite, an on-going series of poetry readings and interviews. For this edition, we welcome Bunkong Tuon, a Cambodian-American writer and critic. He is the author of Gruel, And So I Was Blessed (both published by NYQ Books), The Doctor Will Fix It (Shabda Press), and Dead Tongue (a chapbook with Joanna C. Valente, Yes Poetry). He teaches at Union College, in Schenectady, NY. He tweets @BunkongTuon

Below the video, you can find links to the poems from Tuon’s reading.

 

 

From Bunkong Tuon’s reading:

“Our Neighborhood in Revere, MA”

“Snow Day”

“Tightrope Dancer”

“Women’s March in Albany”

“My Mother on Her Deathbed”

Frank Gallimore: “The Shape of My Name”

Posted on by Chase Dimock

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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)

Howie Good: “The View from Here”

Posted on by Chase Dimock

 

 

 

The View from Here

I’m dusting the indoor plants when the doorbell rings. It’s you, and you’re bleeding from an ear. “What happened to your ear?” I ask. You touch it. Your fingers come away with blood. “Steely Dan on the headphones,” you say. I don’t move, don’t even nod. Now that an estimated 150 species go extinct every day, I try not to rush through my days. And if, as sometimes happens, it feels like everything is speeding up, I’ll lie down on the floor and stare at the ceiling or out the window, my view a small thing but my own.

 

 

 

About the Author: Howie Good’s latest poetry collection, Gunmetal Sky, is due in February from Thirty West Publishing

 

More By Howie Good:

The Third Reich of Dreams

Reason to Believe

People Get Ready

 

Image Credit: Chase Dimock “Parking Lot Prism” (2021)

Poetry Soundbite: An Interview and Reading with Mike James

Posted on by Chase Dimock

 

 

Welcome to AIOTB Magazine’s first Poetry Soundbite, an on-going series of poetry readings and interviews. For our inaugural Poetry Soundbite, we welcome Mike James, author of over a dozen books of poetry, including the soon to be released Leftover Distances, from Luchador Press. Below the video, you can find the text of the poems from James’ reading.

 

 

 

.

.

 

.

 

“Falling as We Go” and “Drunk Butterflies near the Missouri River” previously appeared in The Rye Whiskey Review.

 

About the Author: Mike James has published widely in places such as Plainsongs, Laurel Poetry Review, Birmingham Poetry Review, Gargoyle, and Tar River Poetry. His poetry collections include: Parades (Alien Buddha), Jumping Drawbridges in Technicolor (Blue Horse), Crows in the Jukebox (Bottom Dog), and My Favorite Houseguest (FutureCycle.) He has served as an associate editor of The Kentucky Review, of Autumn House Press, and of The Good Works Review, as well as the publisher of the now defunct Yellow Pepper Press. He currently serves as an associate editor of the prose poem journal Unbroken. His 18th collection, Leftover Distances, is forthcoming from Luchador Press. A multiple Pushcart nominee, Mike has read and lectured at festivals and universities throughout the country He is strong supporter of cats, literacy, coffee, white wine, top hats, crows, and free range poetics. He is an opponent of plaid, rigidity, salads, and quiet parakeets. He currently makes his home right outside Nashville.

Jonel Abellanosa: “Anilius”

Posted on by Chase Dimock

..

.

Anilius

And if some people and nonpeople
call us false coral snake? Nothing
untrue with the bright red and black
bands segmenting our bodies in your
fossorial wonder, ways you follow
imagination’s slither into quiet joy.

Evolution has left us the vestigial
pelvic girdle, which makes me picture
human swaying hips – to and fro
geometry to hunger’s kiss, zig and zag
into beetle delicacies, fish and frogs
of lunar gourmandizing.

We bear the oldest ancestral traces,
skulled, like lizards, with God’s
original blueprint for our biology,
most resembling our kin that bit heels
of dinosaurs – finding the broken
fangs way it isn’t edible.

.

.

About the Author: Jonel Abellanosa lives in Cebu City, The Philippines. His poetry and fiction are forthcoming in Poetry Salzburg Review, Chiron Review and Eunoia Review; and appeared in hundreds of magazines, including As It Ought to Be, The Lyric, Thin Air, Rigorous, Loch Raven Review and The Anglican Theological Review. His poetry collections include, “Songs from My Mind’s Tree” and “Multiverse” (Clare Songbirds Publishing House, New York), “50 Acrostic Poems,” (Cyberwit, India), “In the Donald’s Time” (Poetic Justice Books and Art, Florida), and his speculative poetry collection, “Pan’s Saxophone” (Weasel Press, Texas). His works have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Dwarf Stars and Best of the Net Awards.

.

More by Jonel Abellanosa:

Jaguar

.

Image Credit: Digitally enhanced image from: The naturalists’ miscellany: London: Printed for Nodder co,1789. Image courtesy of the Biodiversity Heritage Library. Creative Commons License 2.0.

R.T. Castleberry: “Stopping to Leave”

Posted on by Chase Dimock

 

 

 

Stopping to Leave

Dire drift, the afternoon lurks—
flood forecast, prayers rising
from upraised hands, open text.
Rain passes over,
seedlings, oak and elm stirred
by South Coast wind.
Cell phone walkers stretch a crosswalk light.
Food trucks pack for dinner destination.
Pocket park slowly closes—
cigarettes smoked, office lunches done.
Coming off the bridge,
an Audi slips left lane to right,
driver dreaming at the wheel.
Yellow vest workmen scuff
to Ram and Silverado,
helmets and coolers thumping at hips.
Parking lots empty to open arid space,
to painted white lines and chain link.
Captured bags flutter like half-mast flags.
Metal doors and lights lowered,
we are locking down to leave.

 

 

About the Author: R.T. Castleberry is a widely published poet and critic. His work has appeared in Roanoke Review, Trajectory, Blue Collar Review, White Wall Review, The Alembic and Visitant. Internationally, Castleberry’s work has been published in Canada, Wales, Ireland, Scotland, New Zealand and Antarctica. Mr. Castleberry’s work has been featured in the anthologies, Travois-An Anthology of Texas Poetry, The Weight of Addition, Anthem: A Tribute to Leonard Cohen and You Can Hear the Ocean: An Anthology of Classic and Current Poetry.

 

More By R.T. Castleberry:

Down Cold Lanes

July, Roadhouse Dinner

 

Image Credit: “Detail of east side of overpass, showing spandrel beam, piers, roadway and guardrails. View to southwest. – 86th Street Overpass, Spanning Interstate 35 & 80 at Northwest Eighty-sixth Street, Urbandale, Polk County, IA ” The Library of Congress

Tim Heerdink: ’70 Chevelle

Posted on by Chase Dimock

 

 

’70 Chevelle

A dream I once held in the past passed away today
with the final sell of my father’s ’70 Chevelle.

See, the dusty shell was not just an old car
but a hope to rebuild and journey through memory.

My parents went on their honeymoon to French Lick
with bold black stripes across the stark red hood.

I recently came across a photograph of these moments
snapped thirty-six years ago as of last month
in my search for my mother’s youth
as she slowly slips with the cancer in her head.

February of ’84 saw several feet of snow
mixed with influenza that failed to ruin romance.

Perhaps I’ve never seen the kind of money in cash
it takes to purchase a dream like the hotrod I never got
the chance to take a ride in on a warm sunny day,
but there still is family and a little time for us to spend.

 

 

About the Author: Tim Heerdink is the author of The Human Remains, Red Flag and Other Poems, Razed Monuments, and short stories, The Tithing of Man and HEA-VEN2. His poems appear in Poetry Quarterly, Fish Hook, Flying Island, Auroras and Blossoms, Kissing Dynamite, Tanka Journal, and various anthologies. He is President of Midwest Writers Guild of Evansville, Indiana.

 

Image Credit: John Margolies “Uniroyal Tire, I-94, Dearborn, Michigan” (1986) The Library of Congress

Tim Peeler: “Drive-in 21”

Posted on by Chase Dimock

 

 

Drive-in 21

Through the pounding thunderstorm,
They endured blue lightning flashes,
Great drops of steaming rain,
And on the screen, the first of
A double feature, Invasion
Of the Blood Farmers,
A film shot so poorly
That day and night shots
Were jumbled together;
So cheap, the actors were paid
With six packs of beer
To play blood-seeking druids
On a mission to save their queen.
They gritted their teeth
As their wipers slashed,
The speaker crackled, and
The parking lot emptied
Of all but the stoners
And the crazies awaiting
The second feature,
Shriek of the Mutilated,
Wherein grad students
Undertake a field trip
To Boot Island in search of Yeti,
And the hardcores were rewarded
When the summer skies cleared
And fell silent as the hairy
Beast began his carnage.

 

 

 

About the Author: A past winner of the Jim Harrison Award for contributions to baseball literature, Tim Peeler has 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.

 

More By Tim Peeler:

Modernist Hay Making

Paramnesia 2

Ballers 2, the Star’s Monologue 3

 

Image Credit: John Margolies “Augusta Drive-in Theater, Route 11, Augusta, Maine” (1984) The Library of Congress

Nathanael Stolte: “New, but Borrowed”

Posted on by Chase Dimock

 

 

New, but Borrowed

Though I’m in a new, but borrowed, bed
in a strange land
you’ve never been to
I still sleep on only half
the old habitual repetition

I know you’re not coming

and I’m certainly not
saving it for you
or anyone

not saving it at all
not holding intimate space
for anyone in this dating economy

I leave books of poems
and novels there
that I read before dreaming

all the companionship I require

I don’t fix the covers in the morning
never cared much for that

I dream I’m covered in ticks
and they’re hungry
growing fat
and round
and gray and smooth as old river stones
it doesn’t itch
but I can’t scream
because my teeth are old river stones
round
gray and
smooth
as fattened ticks
and my mouth is full of butterflies
and secrets
too subtle to recall
when the sun rises
like bubblegum over
the far pasture
out the spotted plate glass
picture window
creeping at first
then all at once

I’m not covered in parasites
and my teeth are just fillings

 

 

About the Author: Nathanael Stolte is an artist and poet from Buffalo, NY. His poems have turned up all over the place. He is the author of several chapbooks and Shoot the Alligators Closest to the Boat (Stubborn Mule, 2019) & Beggar’s Songbook (Spartan Press, 2020). He was an artist in residence at Osage Arts Community in Belle, MO this year where he was making visual art until his plans were interrupted by a mild heart attack. Now he’s staring down the barrel of 40 and living in his mother’s basement.

 

Image Credit: Russell Lee “Piercing a mattress in tufting. Mattress factory. San Angelo, Texas” (1939) The Library of Congress

Chase Dimock: “Imitation Unicorns”

Posted on by Chase Dimock

 

 

 

Imitation Unicorns
– For Nellie

When I first held you
I watched Unicorns prance
in soft fleecy pink across
your onesie as your dreaming
breathing belly rose in and out
lifting them off into the infinite
pastel possibilities of infancy.

I wondered when you’ll start
sorting your fairy tale menagerie
into fact and fiction, when Z
will still be for Zebra, but U
will have to settle for Urchin
or the Unspotted Saw-whet Owl
the Unlined Giant Chafer Beetle
the Unstreaked Tit-Tyrant
or any number of animals
defined by what they lack.

Will you still marvel at
the Unadorned Rock Wallaby
despite his lack of adornment?

Will you still respect
the Unarmored Threespine Stickleback
despite her vulnerability?

Will you accept substitutes?

The fencing Narwhal
swashbuckling the Baltic
more weaponized than majestic

The Hornbill who flies like pegasus
but shrieks, fighting for figs in the trees

When Marco Polo first laid eyes
on a Rhinoceros in the land of Basma
he wrote, Unicorns are
           altogether different from what we fancied.

He bemoaned, Unicorns are
……..not in the least like that which our stories tell of.
           They delight much to abide in mire and mud.
           Tis a passing ugly beast to look upon.
I hope you never use myth as your measure.

When you gaze at the Unicorn trotting through
the frosted cupcake mountains on your Lisa Frank
Trapper Keeper, know that fantasy is a projection
of our inner colors, on a world both grey, and yet
so brilliant, we can’t see all the light in the spectrum.

And most of all, humor your uncle
when he pulls a mule to your birthday party,
straps a rainbow painted corn cob to its head.
When you ride old Wilbur into a sunset that stops
at the fence in your backyard, know he did the best
Unicorn impersonation his old bones could carry.

 

Imitation Unicorns appears in Sentinel Species, now available from Stubborn Mule Press on most online bookstores.

 

 

About the Author: Chase Dimock lives among mountain lions and coyotes in an undisclosed location between Laurel Canyon and the Hollywood Hills of Los Angeles. He serves as the Managing Editor of As It Ought To Be Magazine and makes his living teaching literature and writing at College of the Canyons. His poetry has been published in Waccamaw, Hot Metal Bridge, Faultline, Roanoke Review, New Mexico Review, and Flyway among others. He holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Illinois and his scholarship in World Literature and LGBT Studies has appeared in College Literature, Western American Literature, Modern American Poetry, The Lambda Literary Review, and several edited anthologies. For more, visit chasedimock.com

 

Image Credit: from “Historiae naturalis de quadrupedibus libri” (1657) Image Courtesy of the Biodiversity Heritage Library