Ace Boggess: “Rain/Snow Mix”

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Rain/Snow Mix

Don’t know whether to wear my gloves
or grab the cobalt umbrella 
with its one bent, awkward arm.

I’ll get wet, but maybe it’s one of those dry wets.

If the temp were ten degrees cooler,
every question would have an answer
rather than another question:
should I stay home? risk it for a quick trip to the store?

The meteorologist mocks & prattles, 
goofing like an Auguste clown.
I think it’s funny we never see his shoes.

 

About the Author: Ace Boggess is author of five books of poetry—Misadventure, I Have Lost the Art of Dreaming It So, Ultra Deep Field, The Prisoners, and The Beautiful Girl Whose Wish Was Not Fulfilled—and the novels States of Mercy and A Song Without a Melody. His writing has appeared in Harvard Review, Notre Dame Review, Mid-American Review, Rattle, River Styx, and many other journals. He received a fellowship from the West Virginia Commission on the Arts and spent five years in a West Virginia prison. He lives in Charleston, West Virginia. His sixth collection, Escape Envy, is forthcoming from Brick Road Poetry Press in 2021.

 

More by Ace Boggess:

Rock Garden

And Why Am I A Free Man?

Why Did You Try To Sober Up?

 

Image Credit: “Unidentified man with umbrella standing in street with building in background” (1921) The Library of Congress

Fabrice Poussin: “Getting Old”

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Getting Old

She stared into a worn-out mirror
familiar motion of early morning rises
seeking the imperfection born of the darkness.

Uncertain in the first hours of early frosts
she Passed her personal inspection
with the gaze of an unmatched surgeon.

Robed in the purity of the soft cotton
she caresses the gentle envelope of the years
complete in the glee that life still loans.

Remembering birthdays of another century
she wonders at the purity of the white satin
where not a line yet has written a somber destiny.

The certainty of time has gone into another realm
where dimensions come together into space
and she smiles even when they call her granny.

 

About the Author: Fabrice Poussin teaches French and English at Shorter University. Author of novels and poetry, his work has appeared in Kestrel, Symposium, The Chimes, and many other magazines. His photography has been published in The Front Porch Review, the San Pedro River Review as well as other publications.

 

Image Credit: Jacob Byerly “Portrait of an Elderly Woman in Matron Cap” (1844) Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program.

Geoffrey Heptonstall: “One for Sorrow, Two for Sorrow”

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ONE FOR SORROW, TWO FOR SORROW

The bird that sings a stolen song 
leaves echoes of another sound 
from a tongue bereft of voice.
‘Pica, pica,’ the magpie cries, 
naming its nature in air.
Joytaker, heartbreaker, 
what it sees it steals 
in glistening desire, 
feathered with wildness 
to plunder the beauty of things.
The joker in a pack of lies, 
it lives on sorrow alone.

 

About the Author: Geoffrey Heptonstall is the author of a novel, Heaven’s Invention [revised paperback edition Black Wolf, 2017] and a collection of poetry, The Rites of Paradise [Cyberwit 2020].

 

Image Credit: Australian Magpie courtesy of the Biodiversity Heritage Library

Tony Pena: “Birds of a Feather”

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Birds of a Feather

The black birds caw
as I hobble to my Honda
CRV noir like Mister
no meniscus on the lam
from hard boiled critics
who put Clarice Starling
on my case for killing
so many of my darlings.
In my standard literary
issue of charcoal satin
shirt and dungarees,
I ask of the evening
in iambic slang,
if the crows consider
me an accomplice
to their murder
or just another
Edgar Allan wannabe.

 

 

About the Author: Tony Pena was formerly 2017-2018 Poet Laureate for the city of Beacon, New York.  His work has appeared in several publications over the years. Recently, poems have appeared in 1870, Museum of Poetry, and the Rye Whiskey Review. A volume of poetry and flash fiction, “Blood and Beats and Rock n Roll,” is available at Amazon.  A chapbook of poetry, “Opening night in Gehenna,” is available from author. Colorful compositions and caterwauling with a couple of chords can be seen at:

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Image Credit: illustration from A synopsis of the birds of Australia, and the adjacent Islands. London: John Gould, 1837. Courtesy of the Biodiversity Heritage Library

Brian Connor: “Baseball Bastardized”

Posted on by Chase Dimock

 

Baseball Bastardized:

How the Bungled Response to Covid-19 Reveals Baseball’s Inability to Evolve in a Changing Culture

By Brian Connor

 

Nothing could be done with the timing. Baseball happened to be the most heavily affected domino that fell among the cancelled major sports, unable to cancel a postseason or come up with a video game-esque return to play tournament format. The NBA, NHL, and Premier League soccer all shifted towards finishing up what little of the season remained or moving right to postseason play- in other words, the best part of the year for all of them. The MLB, meanwhile, had to get everyone out of Arizona and Florida and figure out how to come close to salvaging the 2,430 games they would have otherwise played.

Baseball was never a sport designed to make everyone happy. If you do your job right 3 out of 10 times, you likely get put on a performance review; if you’re a major leaguer who gets a hit 3 out of 10 at-bats, you likely get put on the All-Star team. If you go to bed with your favorite team having lost that day 62 times a year, you probably root for one of the best teams in the league and went to sleep happy the other 100 times. Whether a casual fan or an absolute fanatic, your favorite type of games are likely fast games (i.e. under 3 hours) featuring a lot of homers and runs scored- in other words, games that almost never happen. 

So it was likely wrong for us to assume that we were going to be happy with whatever makeshift version of a Major League Baseball season was going to be proposed, especially as it became reality that our usual summer of a hot dog and a cold beer in the bleachers, a walk by a sports bar with the game feed audible, and a game on the TV as background noise to a family party was less and less likely to happen. And as the transition of winter to spring and, now, spring to summer came without the glistening feel of Opening Day, the rawness of the world suspended the joy of the turn of the seasons as all came to a halt. There was no joy in Mudville, for they were all indoors.

Baseball then tried, in earnest I suppose, to try to come up with a plan to return, because America’s pastime, damnit. Forget that boring old soccer or that ice hockey thing I could never really understand, we need baseball back to heal this nation, for Christ! And yes, there are much bigger things for everyone both on a societal and personal level and many lives to be saved in the time of a pandemic. But I get it, though baseball junkie I am: emblematic of both the daily grind of the American worker and the daydream summer’s day that gets over half the country through its brutal winter, the sport hits differently than others. World wars couldn’t stop it; 9/11 merely delayed it; there’s an invincibility surrounding it, as sure as summer comes, so does baseball.

So where are we, then, as we approach almost three months since the originally scheduled Opening Day? Mainly, prorated salaries for players were proposed by team owners, agreed to by those players, then taken back for further pay cuts by those owners. This is likely because it simply won’t be feasible to play in front of fans this year, and ticket sales, concessions, etc. are the money makers for teams.  The losses expected are, exact words from Cubs owners Tom Ricketts, “biblical” for this year for MLB. No crosstown rivalry here: he and Jerry Reinsdorf mark the Chicago owners worth $1.8 billion who likely won’t see a dime of ticket sales between their two baseball teams this year. At least they have a better fate than the five poor bastards in the group of owners worth less than a billion- how else would they sleep at night? (Bringing up the rear is supposedly Reds owner Bob Castellini, with a net worth of a chump change $400 million)

But who wants that pressure of owning a team and striking a deal, anyway? I just want to take my family of four to a baseball game, just like when I was a kid. In 2019 this came out to an average of $32.99 a person just for the privilege of being in the park (damn Yankees driving those price up). Pops need a cold beer, of course, and a dollar saved is a dollar earned, kids, so I’m getting this light beer for $10 instead of a craft beer for $12. You kids need a hot dog, too, and thank goodness for that family deal for a hot dog and a drink- cheaper than sold separately! This Bud’s for me, so honey, you can have my fountain drink and we all come out ahead at $11.75 apiece! You look like you could use a $20 hat, Junior- my dad got me one when I was your age- and your brother needs a souvenir bat for another $25. We’ve got all that, so let’s strap in for at least 3 hours and watch .006% of the regular season!

Unrelated, baseball’s popularity is decreasing nationwide but had a revenue of $10.37 billion dollars last year. If only owners had made their coffee and avocado toast at home, maybe they would’ve saved some money for the players this year.

Two things are true for me at once, as things often are now: baseball is my favorite sport, and I can no longer justify why anyone would take a rooting interest in it. I called it America’s pastime earlier, but it isn’t anymore: five NFL regular season games drew higher TV ratings than Game 7 of the World Series last year, and never mind trying to follow a team for 162 days of the year as opposed to 16 Sundays. Soccer’s boring and low scoring? Check the fans in the 80th minute of a 1-0 Premier League game compared to the 8th of a 1-0 baseball game. Best live experience? Be there in person for a 2-1 hockey game. Most exciting sport? Same hockey game, only playoffs. How often have you seen a Steph Curry 3 or a LeBron dunk on Twitter? Every other winter day for about five years, right? What about a Mike Trout highlight of any kind? Whenever the official MLB account decides to tweet about it, I’m guessing? And don’t even think about giving baseball or the modern day Babe Ruth that free publicity on YOUR account, that’s against the rules! If James Harden does anything funny, go viral, you millennial hippie, but don’t ruin the sanctity of baseball with that vine of a home run!

These were my gripes before coronavirus, usually countered with “can’t beat being there on a nice day” and “you never really see the same thing twice”. Now we likely won’t be able to watch it in person at all this year, again destined for a boring summer due to a labor dispute, again making the same mistake that doomed the sport back in 1994.  The owners who supposedly cannot cope with the idea of lost revenue have nixed the player’s proposal of a 114 game season with a final offer of 50 games, as if the increased per game importance will salvage the sport. 

This is where we stand, then, summer nearly in full. We are days away from a no contact sport with bases 90 feet apart not being able to figure out how to handle coronavirus, with variations of it currently being played elsewhere in the world and all other major sports leagues either starting or finalizing plans to start.  In a country with millions out of work, 30 owners have its most traditional sport at a standstill out of caution of paying their players risking exposure to a virus in a worldwide pandemic a little bit more than they’d like. As places gradually start to return to normal, the best case scenario for a Major League Baseball season is a bastardized, bite-sized, 50 game sprint despite the wishes of fans and players alike.  Baseball is, and should be, taking a backseat to the much more important things that affect our day to day lives more than any game ever could (unless you want to add it to the list of things that need racial reform: only 7% of MLB players are Black). But in a time when we just need it to be a three hour distraction in any iteration, it can’t even be that. 

Nothing could be done with the timing. So much more could have been done with the time that immediately followed.

 

About the Author: Brian Connor writes on a number of topics, though most consistently about baseball on a fan site covering the White Sox during the season. Some further readings can be found at discodemolished.blogspot.com, which lately has been a similar screaming in the void nature of MLB coverage.

 

Image Credit: “Detroit ball player slides safely into third base as fielder reaches to the left for ball on the ground during baseball game” The Library of Congress

Leslie M. Rupracht: “Brothers”

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Brothers 

The phone call behind him,
shock still fresh in his ears,  

the surviving brother    
reaches for memories 
long archived in the depths 
of a cerebral vault, 

untapped for a half-century 
and more until this unending night

Images of two laughing brothers 
upon hand-built rafts forged of scrap 
barn wood, frayed ropes and faith, 
floating on creek waters 

into the rapids of his 
consciousness—

a pair of young captains, 
made of invincible braveness, are
summoned into this sobering moment 
to placate a suddenly lonesome man’s 

shattered hope to bond and build 
more durable craft with his brother

In irretrievable youth 
as in this irreversible hour 
and the tomorrows of his mourning, 
he realized 

he always wanted more 
of his big brother’s time

 

About the Author: Leslie M. Rupracht is an editor, poet, writer, and visual artist living in the Charlotte/Lake Norman region of North Carolina since 1997. Her words and artwork appear in various journals (most recently Gargoyle), anthologies, group exhibits, and a chapbook, Splintered Memories (Main Street Rag, 2012). Longtime senior associate editor of now-retired Iodine Poetry Journal, Rupracht also edited NC Poetry Society’s 2017 and 2018 Pinesong anthology. Swearing off a corporate work relapse, Rupracht co-founded and hosts Waterbean Poetry Night at the Mic in Huntersville, NC.

 

Image Credit: “Portrait of Two Seated Boys” (1850s) Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program.

Mike James Reviews “Dead Letter Office: Selected Poems” By Marko Pogacar

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Mike James Reviews

Dead Letter Office: Selected Poems

By Marko Pogacar

 

Translated poetry is notoriously difficult to critique. Are we judging the work of the poet or the translator or the right combination of both? Even the best translation is a bit like listening to music playing in the apartment next door: we notice some of the beauty, but miss much of the subtlety. 

Ezra Pound famously said he wanted to know, “what could not be lost in translation.” One of the items more difficult to lose is imagery. The power of rhetoric may increase or decrease depending on the translator, but a clear, unusual image is harder to erase. 

Marko Pogacar is a poet well known in his native Croatia; however, this is his first volume translated into American English. Thankfully, for him and the reader, his translator is the supremely gifted Andrea Jurjevic, whose own poetry ranges across a similar landscape of stunning imagery and heart wrenching epiphany. 

Before diving into the poems, there’s a preface which calls out both Pogacar’s age (he’s in his mid-30’s) and the wars which shaped his early years. A good translator’s preface should address the work of the author being translated, as well as provide context on his life, while also addressing the nature of translation. Jurjevic does all of that. 

Her preface does a fine job of setting expectations for the reader. She writes, “There’s no idling in these poems. They’re noisy, mercurial, authentic. Their movement resembles a beehive; it is unpredictable and usually turned inward. The sound offers both a sword and a shield.” 

The last line is telling because much of the imagery throughout the collection is tied equally to violence and protection. Pogacar writes that “death fits into the three dots / at the end of an incomplete sentence,” but, despite that, “beautiful obstacles are everywhere.”  

Pogacar’s world is logic free and completely relatable. His poems exist within a dreamscape of surrealism and black humor. This is illustrated with the collection’s very first poem, the wonderfully titled, “Man Dines In His Father’s Slippers.” The poem begins as a type of love poem with the line, “What used to be borders, is now you.” The narrator then moves to a description of the environment and then back to observations on his internal life. The poem is structured as a jagged, uneven see-saw. Ultimately, it all evens out as the narrator tells us, “not love, stupidity, stupidity is the heart of the world– / and now in those slippers I eat and cry, / only eat and cry in the house.”

If a collection of poems is to be judged not just by the number of successful poems within it, but also by the number of exotically memorable lines, then Dead Letter Office succeeds on every level. Pogacar can take a reader into “a cage for the dreamless owl of the heart” and allow her to live there among “an archive of errors.”

 

Dead Letter Office: Selected Poems by Marko Pogacar
Translated by Andrea Jurjevic
The Word Works, 2020
Poetry/Translation, $21

 

About the Author: Mike James makes his home outside Nashville, Tennessee. He has published in numerous magazines throughout the country in such places as Plainsongs, Gargoyle, Birmingham Poetry Review, and Chiron Review. His fifteen poetry collections include: Journeyman’s Suitcase (Luchador), Parades (Alien Buddha), Jumping Drawbridges in Technicolor (Blue Horse), First-Hand Accounts from Made-Up Places (Stubborn Mule), Crows in the Jukebox (Bottom Dog), My Favorite Houseguest (FutureCycle), and Peddler’s Blues (Main Street Rag.) He served as an associate editor of The Kentucky Review and currently serves as an associate editor of Unbroken.

 

More By Mike James:

Grace

Paul Lynde

Oh Daddy, Give Me A Quarter For The Time Machine

 

Image Credit: “Chief Post Office Mail Room, Wellington 1920” Archives New Zealand Creative Commons 2.0

Scott Silsbe: “Reading Rich Gegick’s Greasy Handshakes at Neighbors Tavern in Jeannette, Pennsylvania”

Posted on by Chase Dimock

 

 

Reading Rich Gegick’s Greasy Handshakes at Neighbors Tavern in Jeannette, Pennsylvania

Since it’s my first time at Neighbors, I don’t know what I want
to drink. Call me a snob, but none of the drafts look appealing 
to me. But I order one anyway. I can’t recall the last time that 
I had me a Coors Banquet beer. And it doesn’t taste bad. But it 
doesn’t taste great either—perhaps one of the worst things you 
can say about a beer. But I’ve got a copy of Greasy Handshakes 
and that is something. At the art gallery, Newman gave me a big 
box of them to take to Rich, his author copies. And I pulled one 
out of the box to have as a companion at the bar, promising I’d 
replace it after my brief stop off at Neighbors. Thinking maybe 
I’d only have to have one Coors Banquet if Bobby would be up 
for company once I am back in Allegheny County, and across
the Westinghouse Bridge, where I feel at home, close to my lady 
and my friends and my collection of books and records, cassettes
and compact discs and 8-tracks, DVDs and VHS tapes. I know 
I’m a sucker for crap. I fucking love crap. Maybe older crap 
especially, but any crap’ll do. My crap. All that crap that I own.
That crap almost makes you feel immortal, you know? I’m going
to own all this crap forever. These records. These old-ass books.
I didn’t spill any of my Banquet on the book I borrowed, Rich.
Next time I go to Neighbors, I think I’ll get a bottle of High Life.
Or else maybe I’ll just stick to going to Johnny’s Wife’s Place.

 

About the Author: Scott Silsbe was born in Detroit. He now lives in Pittsburgh. His poems have been collected in three books—Unattended Fire, The River Underneath the City, and Muskrat Friday Dinner. He is also an assistant editor at Low Ghost Press.

 

More By Scott Silsbe:

Double Downriver

 

Image Credit: John Vachon “Bartender in Catholic Sokol Club. Ambridge, Pennsylvania” (1941) The Library of Congress

 

Victor Clevenger: “Low-Flying Birds”

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As It Ought To Be Magazine, in a partnership with River Dog Press and Temple of Man, is proud to feature Victor Clevenger’s Low-Flying Birds, as a free downloadable chapbook of poetry.

River Dog is a small press from Missouri creating chapbooks, broadsides and zines. They are not any sort of commercial enterprise, but simply two friends who wanted to get back to basics, to why they got into all of this to begin with, to offer something from the heart. For more information on River Dog’s publications, inquire at thezineriverdog@yahoo.com

 

About the Author: Victor Clevenger spends his days in a Madhouse and his nights writing poetry.  Selected pieces of his work have appeared in print magazines and journals around the world.  He is the author of several collections of poetry including Sandpaper Lovin’ (Crisis Chronicles Press, 2017), A Finger in the Hornets’ Nest (Red Flag Poetry, 2018), and Corned Beef Hash By Candlelight (Luchador Press, 2019).  Together with American poet John Dorsey, they run River Dog.

 

More By Victor Clevenger:

Milkman’s Mustache

$5.00 Wok

Bunkong Tuon: “Song I Sing”

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Song I Sing

America, you were brave once,
decent, almost pure, but never quite
the myths you tell yourself.
Is this the karma from centuries of bloodshed,
lands pilfered, women raped, men murdered,
lynching, assassinations, race riots, class inequality?
You name it, we have it.
You want Coca Cola? You want heroin?
You want coke? Me love you long time.
What’s a little bit of sex, drugs, rock ‘n roll,
legalized murders and colonialism in the name
of democracy, which is just a fancy name
for imposing our definitions on those
with a different set of definitions.
A war is a war however you name it,
just like a murder is a murder however
you spin it. Thus anger screams for justice
on the streets of Los Angeles,
Chicago and Minneapolis,
the fire of unfulfilled dreams burning
across your once great land.
Meanwhile the pandemic death toll reaches
100,000 and counting.
They say bodies pile as high
as the flag, not enough plastic bags,
lying against walls of mobile mortuaries,
not enough space in local cemeteries.
There’s talk of making burial grounds
in local parks where children used to play..
There’s talk of reopening the economy,
money valued over human life,
business as usual, the old American way.
Is America going mad or am I going crazy?
I’m tired of reading the news these days.
I’d rather take my daughter to the park,
ride swings with our feet against
the bright burning sun, go down slides
and scream our hearts out, laugh
like the little children we all are.
I want to smoke hash with Allen Ginsberg,
grocery shopping in search of Whitman,
talk poetry, Buddhism, and God,
all of which are the same thing, a celebration
of the human Godhead, the human breath,
the Atman in all of us. Love
ourselves. Take good care.
America, I love you even when you spit
at my Asian brothers and sisters,
throw rocks at their cars, accuse
them of carrying the “Wuhan virus.”
When I speak, you don’t hear.
Some don’t believe that I should be here,
a place at the table, where professors
profess, poets sing, students evaluate.
I have no wisdom here. Only this.
The birds soar high in the bright blue sky.
Everything is blue, crystal clear.
The air is clean. Those birds,
they are singing their songs again.
Oh, I love you all. In spite of it.
I love you all. I just can’t do otherwise.

 

About the Author: Bunkong Tuon is 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

 

More By Bunkong Tuon:

Gender Danger

Lies I Told About Father

Fishing for Trey Platoo

 

Image Credit: “American Flag” Harris and Ewing [between 1915 and 1923] The Library of Congress