Magazine
Sue Blaustein: “A Song for Centipedes”
Felicia Clark: “Chrome Cheers”
john compton: “[we play scrabble—]”
Sam Culotta: “Voices in the Other Room”
Jenna K Funkhouser: “The House at the End of the Road”
Ken Gierke: “After the Rain”
Julia Hatch: “A Thoughtless Moment of Zen”
James Croal Jackson: “Drymouth”
Daniel Edward Moore: “From the Castle of Resentment”
Jimmy Pappas: “The Ineffable”
John Brantingham Reviews
K. E. Semmel’s The Book of Losman
Santa Fe Writer’s Project, October 1, 2024
I love any novel that affirms courage and hope, especially when the world seems shoddy and evil. Kyle Semmel’s The Book of Losman (Santa Fe Writer’s Project) is such a book. At the outset, it doesn’t seem very hopeful. Daniel Losman is a divorced American man living in Copenhagen with joint custody of his three-year-old child. For a living, he translates Danish novels into English, and this profession suits him because he has Tourette syndrome, and his tics cause him to feel embarrassment and shame. However, he answers an ad for a study on his condition and finds that Dr. Pelin and Dr. Jens are developing an experimental drug called BhMe4 that will allow him, through his dreams, to access memories all the way back to his birth, so he can identify why the tics began, if there was a triggering incident, and to possibly cure himself of his condition. He journeys to these moments in his sleep while under the scrutiny of the medical professionals. He especially wants to go back to a memory where an early teacher shamed him for his tics. Losman is suffering, but as he works through this process, he finds a new way to see him, and as he begins to reject this process, he sees himself in a more holistic way. The Book of Losman is therefore not a book so much of loss and being lost as it is about hope and how Losman is able to reevaluate the shame-based approach to life that others have imposed on him; instead he finds a way into life’s richness that goes beyond binary ways of thinking and accepting other people’s diminishments as a kind of truth.
Continue reading “A Review of The Book of Losman”
Jason Baldinger: “a time capsule of dust”
Stephen Barile: “Cedar Crest Cove”
Jane-Rebecca Cannarella: “Quilted Rainbows”
Lorraine Caputo: “And That Wind Twirls”
Rick Christiansen: “Borrowed Blood”
John Dorsey: “Jerry Garcia & German Root Beer”
Howie Good: “Uketopia”
John Grey: “Flower People”
Judy Lorenzen: “Anyway”
Tim Peeler: “Untitled”
LB Sedlacek: “Art vs Life (Dream 09/19/15)”
Nadia Arioli: “Sam Insists Only Oak”
Jon Bennet: “Petty Dreams”
Luis Cuauhtemoc Berriozábal: “Thoughts”
Sarah Carleton: “No, I would not like to ride”
Bart Edelman: “What Happens Here”
Marc Janssen: “Dog Days”
Linda Lerner: “Twenty-Four Hour Non-Stop News”
Anita Lerek: “Song for Blood Vibrato”
Jim Murdoch: “The Great Ledger in the Sky”
Timothy Tarkelly: “Long Night”
Robin Wright: “Nesting”
Funereal Geometry: The Evangelical Congregation Concludes the Funeral by Singing “In Christ, There is No East or West / No North or South,” while Outside the Church and Midway Up, a Steeplejack Tests to See the Steeple’s True
If a plumbline’s run from Heaven’s door bell
to the red baize on Satan’s pool table;
and if such a line bisects their steeple;
and if the steeple’s perpendicular—
perpendicular, foursquare, ever true--
to the church’s temporal foundation,
the workman’s spirit level always rules
theology and recalibration.
Lacking such, the skewed will keep on skewing,
will mime secular drift–anathema
to the faith and the faithful, those who cleave
to the steeple's cleft, crowd a receding
circumference, and create a holy
right angle to the vertical axis.
That’s why the steeplejack’s climbed the steeple
even as the funeral rumbles, smacks
around his calibrations. He’s allowed
no room for error in the elders’ view:
the journeyman’s warrant is the last word
in church doctrine. The steeple must be true,
must aim straight up. The soul shoots for a pole
implied by the steeple. Off-plumb slivers
of a bubble, who knows where the launched soul
might end up. Heaven's the point of a pin.
About the Author: Samuel Prestridge lives and works in Athens, Georgia. He has published work in numerous publications, including Literary Imagination, Style, The Arkansas Review, As It Ought To Be, Poetry Quarterly, Appalachian Quarterly, Paideuma, The Lullwater Review, Poem, Juke Joint, and The Southern Humanities Review.
He is a post-aspirational man whose first book A Dog’s Job of Work is seeking publication. He is currently an Associate Professor of English at the University of North Georgia. His children concede that he is, generally, an adequate father.
Image Credit: John Vachon “Zell, South Dakota. Church buildings” (1942) Public domain image courtesy of the Library of Congress
funeral arrangements in the crawlspace
the floor peels
to reveal the plots
where a son’s memories
were buried
& the son
months later
laid himself
to rest.
//
in the dark room
i hear sobbing.
from the corner
of my eye
a mother
on hands & knees
clawing the boards,
trying to dig open
the wood,
trying to dig open
her son.
About the Author: john compton (he/him) is a gay poet who lives with his husband josh and their dogs and cats. his latest book: my husband holds my hand because i may drift away & be lost forever in the vortex of a crowded store (Flowersong Press; dec 2024) and latest chapbook: melancholy arcadia (Harbor Editions; april 2024)
Image Credit: “Interior view, looking up toward project west at the heavy timber joists and center beam supporting the wood water tank” Public domain image courtesy of the Library of Congress
Wardenclyffe
The present is theirs. The future, for which I really worked, is mine.
-Nicola Tesla
Is what I imagined tangible—
this motor, powered by fireflies,
streamer arc threads of phosphorescent light
discharging from the center coil.
I go from idea to reality,
a star among the stars.
I do not think there is any thrill
like the inventor seeing a creation come to success,
the exhilarating sense of the future.
Sometimes we feel so lonely.
Someday we will know who we really are.
If my current can travel distances,
my work is immortal—
resurrecting my vision, broadcasting to Mars.
Thought is electrical energy.
Why can’t we photograph it?
The primary circuits of us all,
high-speed alternators—
many colors, myriad frequencies.
Sometimes we feel so lonely.
Someday we will know who we really are.
My tower dream ran out of funds—
demolished to scrap,
the property sold to the highest bidder.
I live on credit at the Waldorf,
along with spark-excited ghosts.
My only friends are pigeons in Bryant Park—
My favorite is a female.
As long as she lives,
There is light in my life.
Sometimes we feel so lonely.
Someday we will know who we really are.
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: “Tesla sits with his “magnifying transmitter” in Colorado Springs in 1899″ Image courtesy of Wikipedia. CC BY 4.0
What We’re Here for
for bart solarczyk & bob phillips
your whole generation
seemed to know
how to swat away a compliment
kind words tossed
into a river
full of mud & rust
born out of houses
with tin roofs & tar paper hearts
by men & women
who knew the weight
of factory gloves
after so many years
their fingers piercing
the very edges of time
even poems are just about
doing the job
like pushing a mop
or wiping sweat
away from your heart
after the loss of a friend or a spouse or your sanity
knowing that’s just what time does
knowing you just have to keep putting the work in
because that’s what we’re here for.
About the Author: John Dorsey is the former Poet Laureate of Belle, MO. He is the author of several collections of poetry, including Which Way to the River: Selected Poems: 2016-2020 (OAC Books, 2020), Sundown at the Redneck Carnival, (Spartan Press, 2022, and Pocatello Wildflower, (Crisis Chronicles Press, 2023). He may be reached at archerevans@yahoo.com.
Image Credit: Carol M. Highsmith “Historic house with tin roof in Eutaw, Alabama” (2010) Public domain image courtesy of The Library of Congress
The Desert
arid scrubland where life flees the sun
water washes over color-stained rocks
but provides little relief or support
people trudge under sunhats,
quietly swiping away their sweat
but the lizards thrive and snakes
coil in drowsy satisfaction
a little is enough they seem to say
today is just another day
the flat horizon shimmers in waves
of light and dry heat
trucks roar along the interstate
loaded with boxes and crate,
the concerns of another world,
while the scorpions work
with the basics, ready
to kill and eat as darkness
falls and life slithers forward—
always forward, not to be denied
About the Author: Chuck Kramer’s poetry and fiction have appeared online and in print, most recently Lothlorien, The Raven’s Perch and The Good Men Project. He has also been a finalist in the Gwendolyn Brooks Open Mic Poetry Awards in 2017 and 2023. Memoir in Chicago Quarterly Review (a Notable Essay in Best American Essays 2023), Sobotka, Evening Street Review. Journalism in Chicago Tribune, Sun-Times, Reader, Windy City Times and Gay Chicago Magazine.
Image Credit: Chase Dimock “Desert Exit” (2024)
Tears
Skin once taut over muscle and bone
grows soft and softer still, as age moves on
and may bring sadness unknown before,
or a kind of thrill to mark the passage
on a map of being in this place, this age.
Adventures are remembered in crinkling folds.
Sitting or standing will require slower motion.
No matter the pain that is now no small matter.
An old drum at rest for a while needs the essential oil
of caring hands, each touch and each beat deepening
into warm inviting sounds, smelling of vanilla rain.
Pitter patter, falling softly. Softly enfolded in loved arms.
Hush and listen, safe and dear one, ever close to heart,
where ear is at the center, just as art is in the earth,
and ripples continue beyond the edge of the pond.
About the Author: Geraldine Cannon is a poet, scholar, and editor, also working as a Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Maine at Fort Kent, under her married name–Becker. She has been published in various journals and anthologies. She published Glad Wilderness (Plain View Press, 2008).. She has been helping others publish, and had stopped sending her own material out, but she was encouraged to do so again, and most recently has a new poem in the Winter issue, Gate of Dawn (Monroe House Press, 2024).
Image Credit: Jan Ciągliński “Rain – impressions from the train” Public domain image courtesy of Artvee
