Tag: American Literature

Cord Moreski: “Space Shuffle”

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Space Shuffle

I wonder what music
the one percent will be playing
on their voyage through space
after leaving this warm planet behind
like some kid’s father never returning
after going out for a pack of smokes

maybe it’ll be disco
where they’ll wear roller skates
that glitter like the stars outside
their space shuttle windows
and dance the funky chicken
or the hustle as they get their boogie on

or maybe it’ll be
more of a nu-metal experience
where they’ll sport backward baseball caps
and break stuff like Fred Durst
while Earth in the rearview mirror
turns into a sad puddle of mud

for what it’s worth
I bet it’ll be elevator music
or Muzak for the aficionados
where they’ll tap their champagne flutes
to the beats of soft sounds
waiting to get off on the next floor.

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About the Author: Cord Moreski is a poet from the Jersey Shore. Moreski is the author of The News Around Town (Maverick Duck Press, 2020), Shaking Hands with Time (Indigent Press, 2018), and Stay Afloat Inside (Indigent Press, 2016). He was the host of the New Jersey poetry series Words on Main and the virtual poetry series The Couch Poets Collective. When he is not writing, Cord waits tables for a living and teaches middle school children that poetry is awesome. He is currently working on several new projects for 2022.

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More By Cord Moreski:

Aubrie

Someday

Understudy

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Image Credit: Earth Rise Over The Moon (Public Domain)

Laura Grace Weldon: “Butternut Ridge Cemetery”

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Butternut Ridge Cemetery 

From the back seat my six-year-old asks
about the grandfather who died
when she was four months in the womb.
She wants to know about his favorite color
and what he likes to eat, correcting herself
to say “liked” to eat. She wants to know
what being dead means, for real.

I know children ask full force till
they get what they need, like the time
my oldest asked why people have skin
darker than his, and seconds into
my big-wattage answer
interrupted to ask
why faucets turn “this way”
twisting his hand, “to make it hot.”

But she doesn’t stop asking
and since we’re driving past
the cemetery that minute, I pull in.
She skips around his gravestone
as if in a park, touching dusty
pebbles and leggy buttercups, before
announcing to air and ground
and everything between,
“I’m sorry you’re dead Grandpa.
You would have loved me.”

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About the Author:  Laura Grace Weldon has published three poetry collections: Portals (Middle Creek 2021), Blackbird (Grayson 2019), and Tending (Aldrich 2013). She was named 2019 Ohio Poet of the Year. Laura works as a book editor, teaches writing, and maxes out her library card each week.  lauragraceweldon.com

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Image Credit: Chase Dimock “Small Sunflower” (2021)

John Dorsey: “Paul & the Trailer Park Tornado”

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Sign for the old Dreamland mobile-home park in Phoenix, Arizona.
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Paul & the Trailer Park Tornado

the door of our trailer flapping
my heart wide open
my mother says
not to stand
by the window
where my fingers
touched everything
for the first time

while a plastic pinwheel
in the shape of a rooster
takes flight
over our roof.

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About the Author: John Dorsey lived for several years in Toledo, Ohio. He is the author of several collections of poetry, including Teaching the Dead to Sing: The Outlaw’s Prayer (Rose of Sharon Press, 2006), Sodomy is a City in New Jersey (American Mettle Books, 2010), Tombstone Factory, (Epic Rites Press, 2013), Appalachian Frankenstein (GTK Press, 2015) Being the Fire (Tangerine Press, 2016) and Shoot the Messenger (Red Flag Poetry, 2017),Your Daughter’s Country (Blue Horse Press, 2019), and Which Way to the River: Selected Poems 2016-2020 (OAC Books, 2020). His work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and the Stanley Hanks Memorial Poetry Prize. He was the winner of the 2019 Terri Award given out at the Poetry Rendezvous. He may be reached at archerevans@yahoo.com.

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More By John Dorsey:

Anthony Bourdain Crosses the River of the Dead

Punk Rock at 45

Perpetual Motion

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Image Credit: Carol M. Highsmith “Sign for the old Dreamland mobile-home park in Phoenix, Arizona.” (2008) The Library of Congress

Mike James: “Supporting Characters”

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Supporting Characters

Jill has the largest flea circus of anyone I know. She keeps them practicing in her spare bedroom beside her Winston Churchill mask collection. That’s another obsession I’ve never gotten into. I’d rather collect half-used candles, discarded matchsticks, and light projecting items of every variety. Though not every lamp hides a genie. I’ve learned that from years of rubbing. Jill says she scrubbed away whatever magic her hands held. She uses the harshest, discount soaps. Despite that, her bathroom smells like lavender. Whenever I visit, I go to the bathroom, lock the door, close my eyes, and imagine a charmed garden. On more than one occasion, both Jill and I have forgotten I was there.

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About the Author: Mike James makes his home outside Nashville, Tennessee. He has published in numerous magazines, large and small, throughout the country. His poetry collections include: Leftover Distances (Luchador), Parades (Alien Buddha), Jumping Drawbridges in Technicolor (Blue Horse), and Crows in the Jukebox (Bottom Dog.) In April, Red Hawk will publish his 20th collection, Portable Light: Poems 1991-2021.

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More By Mike James:

Grace

Saint Jayne Mansfield

Paul Lynde

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Image Credit: Chase Dimock “Desert Fence” (2021)

Ace Boggess: “End of the Fence”

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Extremely old wooden fence in the town of San Elizario, near El Paso.

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End of the Fence

Strong winds. A pillar leans.
A beam descends on one side,
angling toward a motorcycle ramp
for squirrels launching themselves
toward flimsy branches.
Wire mesh, loosened, waves
like a nationless flag.

Here is the ruin, lapsing:
all that’s built crumbles,
no matter words spoken,
savior speed-dialed on the phone.

What seemed sturdy all those years
shares news of broken lumber
while the boastful, constant sky
promises other storms, graceless
as madcap dancers in the mud.

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About the Author: Ace Boggess is author of six books of poetry, most recently Escape Envy (Brick Road Poetry Press, 2021). His poems have appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review, Harvard Review, Mid-American Review, River Styx, and other journals. An ex-con, he lives in Charleston, West Virginia, where he writes and tries to stay out of trouble.

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More by Ace Boggess:

Rock Garden

And Why Am I A Free Man?

Why Did You Try To Sober Up?

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Image Credit: Carol M. Highsmith “Extremely old wooden fence in the town of San Elizario, near El Paso, Texas” (2014) The Library of Congress

Jenna K. Funkhouser: “Chihuly’s Baskets”

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Chihuly’s Baskets

How carefully we preserve the emptiness
      in these theaters of light

how the man spins silken robes
      of turquoise and pebbled gold
            from the hot mouth of the kiln
and clothes oxygen in its fragile gowns,
            now
drawing its tensions away
   from the point where there must be
nothingness

cupped in its pale, deep hands

and the prayer he breathes is nothing but
good, good. 

To remain filled is
      to remain heavy

to resist your capacity to hold
invisible things
                          to grow lucent
lose everything
even your darkness

let the fire touch you

it whispers 

this bright shell husked
from the seed of eternity.

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About the Author: Jenna K Funkhouser is an author and nonprofit communicator living in Portland, Oregon. Her poetry has recently been published by Geez Magazine, the Saint Katherine Review, and the Oregon Poetry Association, among others; her first book of poetry, Pilgrims I Have Been, was released in October 2020.

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More by Jenna K. Funkhouser:

Persephone

Gerald Friedman: “A Race of the Red-tailed Hawk”

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A Race of the Red-tailed Hawk 

Audubon shot a hawk,
mostly black-brown.  Painting it
while it still lived, he said,
he chocolate-covered its white marks,
tidied its tail pattern,
not thinking both were typical.
He wrote tall stories:
his specimen bred in Louisiana,
feared him only when he carried his gun.
He baptized it in Latin
after his friend Dr. Harlan;
in English, “Black Warrior”,
maybe something good to have
dying or dead
to be depicted as he saw fit.

Morning frost by the Rio Grande.
All summer Harlan’s, black or rare white,
glided down from Alaska
in my mind.  Now
a red-tail screams. At me?
I sneak, a commando,
to capture it with my camera,
barely disturbing
fragile cottonwood leaves.
By some occult sense
it feels me, flies, straight
as limbs slip by.  Out of view.
But I’ll call it a Harlan’s,
tail white constellated in black.
A stereotypical birdwatcher,
I’m already checking my pictures.
One shot caught that tail,
so I’ll get an accepted sighting.

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About the Author: Gerald Friedman grew up in the suburbs of Cleveland, Ohio, and now teaches physics in Santa Fe, New Mexico.  He has published poetry in various magazines, recently Rat’s Ass Review, Entropy, The Daily Drunk, and Better Than Starbucks.

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Image Credit: Plate 86 of Birds of America by John James Audubon depicting “Black Warrior Falco harlani” Public Domain

Julene Tripp Weaver: “Precious Little Sister”

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Precious Little Sister

Born days before I turned eight
she arrived September 8th—
my birthday September 11th—
I’ve no memory of a party,
of her entry, but pictures—
she’s in a stroller on trips with Mom
and Dad. Soon father started
getting sick, disappearing for weeks
under observation, mother moves us
to the city—our Grandmother
in a hospital with cancer. Life
distorted with change, I walked
alone to school feeling lost
on the streets in Queens.

Now her diagnosis, multiple myeloma,
wheelchair bound at retirement—
chemo, radiation for a blood cancer
like our father’s—facing a stem cell transplant,
the next and only option to extend her life.
Six rounds and there is no remission.
She has her partner, a wife, their son—
in college—a few friends with busy lives,
and me, three thousand miles away,
she’s not asked for my presence.

After Uncle died—she did it all—
a lawyer, she sold three houses,
buried him, later buried Mom,
no more family to die but us.
If the doctors are right she may
stick around with that wheelchair.
My baby sister walked with me
in Paris, New York, Bermuda,
Mexico, Seattle, Portland, and her
home, Philly. She wants to live,
says it’s okay if she can’t walk.
I dread seeing her enfeebled
like our mother after her stroke.
Injustice to retire into this disabled
door—to wheel up the ramp made
for mom. My precious baby sister
so agile raising her son, her final
goal, to see him graduate.

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About the Author: Julene Tripp Weaver is a psychotherapist and writer in Seattle, WA. Her third collection, truth be bold—Serenading Life & Death in the Age of AIDS, was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Awards and won the Bisexual Book Award.  Her book, No Father Can Save Her, is now available as an Ebook.

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Image Credit: George Frederic Watts “Head of A Young Woman” (1860s) Image Courtesy of Artvee

Sterling Warner: “Ebb & Flow”

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Ebb & Flow

I.
Amber beer bottles
back floating on turbid tides
some corked carrying messages
most reduced to glass shards,
razor sharp edges rounded
by the selfsame sand thrust
over rocks, against cliff faces,
around feet wading shoals.

II.
Bull whip kelp wash ashore
after tempests, sunburned beach combers
pop bulb-like heads before gathering
long tentacles, cracking them
like riding crops or cat-o’-nine tails,
flagellating sandcastles & sunbathers
knowing pliable algae’d harmlessly flog
friends & objects of their joyful aggression.

III.
Children tip-toe through flotsam jetsam
scrawl their names in the wet shoreline
place star fish in piles surrounding them
with sea urchins & periwinkle shells
as waves roll in, their creations melt
into a watery fray & they scream
as salty ice hands clutch youthful ankles,
& horseshoe crabs pierce naked feet.

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About the Author: A Washington- based author, poet, educator, word-lover, Sterling Warner’s works have appeared in dozens of literary magazines, journals, and anthologies such as  Ekphrastic Review, A Washington-based author, educator, and Pushcart nominee for poetry, Warner’s works have appeared in many international literary magazines, journals, and anthologies such as  Street Lit., The Ekphrastic Review, Anti-Heroin Chic, The Fib Review, The Vita Brevis Poetry Magazine, and Sparks of Calliope. Warner also has written seven volumes of poetry, including Without Wheels, ShadowCat, Memento Mori: A Chapbook Redux, Edges, Rags & Feathers, Serpent’s Tooth, and Flytraps (2022)—as well as. Masques: Flash Fiction & Short Stories. Currently, he writes, hosts virtual poetry readings, and enjoys retirement. 

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Image Credit:  Chase Dimock “Seagulls at Sunset” (2020)

Cheryl A. Rice: “Remember the Goldfish Will Be Dead By Morning”

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Remember the Goldfish Will Be Dead By Morning, 

as will the thready cobwebs of carnival light
strung above scraps of pavement
that’s seen better days, industrious employees
parking in a fresh lot, neatly painted
plots from end to end,
paint now faded, workers retired,
transferred or deceased.
In the morning, stars will have moved on
to other fairs, or the other side of the globe,
rides beyond not yet unplugged,
not yet spattered with vomit and sweat,
freshly hosed, engines revving.
In the morning, somewhere, there is popcorn
waiting to be heated, holding explosions
tight inside their vegetal chests.
Lemons are being sliced, water chilled,
hot dogs start their hours-long sauna.
But here in our town, all that remains
are tire tracks on the ballfield,
garbage drums full of discarded soda cups,
French fry boats anointed with catsup,
napkins cycling in the breeze.
The sun surveys the damage.
Crews pick debris from the ground,
recycling antics be damned.
And that goldfish you won
tossing rings at impossible pins?
The one you carefully slipped in an empty beer stein
when you got home late, so as to not wake him?
He’s been dead for hours, floating in
glass and baggie, back to tank, egg, essence,
gold all that remains by morning,
a sort of orange sunrise to remind the masses
of reflective vests, steel-toed boots,
the circle of days that we swim around,
in our own bags, without air,
with too much light.

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About the Author: Cheryl A. Rice’s poems have appeared in Home Planet News, Baltimore Review, Up The River, and Misfit Magazine, among others. Recent books include Love’s Compass (Kung Fu Treachery Press), and Until the Words Came (Post Traumatic Press), coauthored with Guy Reed. Her blog is at: http://flyingmonkeyprods.blogspot.com/. Rice lives in New York’s Hudson Valley.“

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Image Credit: Image originally from Annual report 8th; 9th (New York State Forest, Fish and Game Commission) (1902-1903) Image courtesy of the Biodiversity Heritage Library