Expiration Date
In the dream we all had one. Some were subtle,
the back of an earlobe, the sole of your foot. Pale
digits in a delicate Roman font. Others more brazen,
a numeric ring on a middle finger. Nobody got
to choose. It was the first thing new moms checked
after counting fingers and toes, tiny numbers and dashes
in folds of still damp skin. No point trying to get rid of
them. Like the chemistry teacher who scrubbed her skin
raw with a concoction boiled up in the lab. Her
tattoo-artist boyfriend, undeterred,
wielded his needle magic to give her a few more years.
But the merciless 2022 was still there. Many
tried to ignore it, the way third graders in July
refuse to think about September. A few made it into a party,
their birthday’s morbid cousin, where black balloons had a
whole new meaning.
Later I wondered if they
were any better off, those people with indelible dates,
taking their personal time bombs with them as they
went about their lives. At least they were never
surprised by death, foretold as it was from the start. No phone
calls that drop you to your knees. But you’d still have to face
the appointed date, wouldn’t you? Alone in your den, blinds
shut tight, listless ceiling fan stirring above. Feeling the
seconds squeeze through you like cigarette smoke through a
menthol filter. Realizing as you wait—the end is still the end
even when you know its schedule.
About the Author: A 2021 Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, Ken Hines has written poems that appear in AIOTB, Vita Poetica, Ekphrastic Review, Psaltery & Lyre and other magazines. His poem “Driving Test” won the Third Wednesday Journal Annual Poetry Prize. All this scribbling takes place in Richmond, Virginia.
Sirocco
The hot winds blow northwards.
Laboring hearts adapt to a slow-burning rhythm.
Nights find you breathing harder,
dreaming languid dreams dipped in Saharan orange.
Snow melts into puddles, makes
little rapids in the gullies.
Shy bright green unfolds on hitherto
barren winter stalks, like young girls
succumbing to the whispered promise
of swelter, not heeding either calendar
or caution. Cars covered in red sand
use the roads like go-cart runs. An early
tulip pushes through heavy slush,
a sense of unseemliness in the air.
On a park bench two grey heads,
woolen scarves undone daringly,
galoshes protecting warm shoes.
Old hands stripped of thick gloves,
he holds hers and bends over them as far
as his stiff back gives him leave.
The Sirocco will hold a few days.
About the Author: Rose Mary Boehm is a German-born British national living and writing in Lima, Peru. Her poetry has been published widely in mostly US poetry reviews (online and print). She was twice nominated for a Pushcart. Her fifth poetry collection, DO OCEANS HAVE UNDERWATER BORDERS, will be published by Kelsay Books in July 2022. https://www.rose-mary-boehm-poet.com/
Image Credit: Chase Dimock “Dead Leaves and Landscape” (2021)
With his trademark spare and exact style, John Dorsey’s latest book of poetry guides us through a carnival of characters that stretches across the country in space, and deep into his decades on the road. What sets Dorsey apart from the other geographers of trailer parks, small town diners, and dollar stores is the balanced empathy of his writing. There isn’t anything sensationalized or exploited. What he reports may shock, but his work never relies on shock value or gratuitously gruesome description to strike its blow. The power of his work is in his ability to make his readers empathize with the marginalized and grotesque without straying into the cheap pathos of pity.
In a poem about a man who lost part of his nose to cancer, Dorsey concludes in the final stanza:
but he’s not pretty enough for heaven
or the silver screen
& not ugly enough
to hide his face
& let some lonesome dirt road
forget he was ever there
This liminal space between beauty and ugliness, between heaven and hell, is where Dorsey’s redneck carnival is located. Beauty is always tempered by the constraints of the environment in which it lives, and what gets written off as ugly is infused with humanity, glowing with careful understanding. At this carnival, the “prettiest girl in town,” “pours drinks/ &becomes a wingless canary/ singing for tips/ in a cage filled with smoke.” Later, Dorsey’s poem for his grandmother similarly envelops us with smoke, describing her with the following:
I never remember you looking young
shaky hands lighting one cigarette
off the other
black rings under your eyes
but your smile was magic
talking about tv preachers
by their first names
as if they really did care
about your salvation
Cigarette smoke is the before and after: beauty destined to shrivel in its environment and the unsinkable beauty deep within an already withered face. As you thumb through Dorsey’s poems, the question is always, who is living in the before and who is living in the after? Who is the young and beautiful destined for pain and age, and who is the weathered soul whose beauty still flickers from inside a battle scarred body?
Take his short “Trailer Park Song, 1982” for example:
my brother
angry
red faced
screaming
& beautiful.
Brief, simple, yet unexpected. Dorsey hands us the unanticipated connection of anger and beauty without a treatise on their causal relationship. In another poem, “Love Letter for Jana Horn”:
the mailbox is full of postcards
from hipster boys
&aging dreamers
who just want
to be swallowed whole
by a desert rose
The young who are destined to become old, and the old who cling to what makes us young in spirit all desire to be consumed by beauty. In Dorsey’s poetry, beauty is as much an aspiration as it is a physical state. Physical beauty is fated to fade, which in of itself is beautiful, but the aspiration toward beauty is what remains after flesh fails.
The only time Dorsey is explicit in labeling true ugliness, is ironically, when he describes a young woman asking “for donations/ for a baby beauty pageant”:
$10 here
$5 there
for a twirl
at the baton
of immortality
sometimes there
is nothing uglier
than
hope.
It’s here where Dorsey draws somewhat of a line where his appreciation of the aspiration toward beauty stops. There is an inherent ugliness in these pageants that exploit the bodies of young people and inculcates in them a belief that beauty should be subject to the judgment of others. Yet, even in his distaste for the pageant, Dorsey isn’t judgmental of the young woman asking for donations. She has bought into the ugly side of hope when our culture commodifies our aspirations to be beautiful. The same is implied in the earlier poem about his grandmother and the TV preachers who pretend to care about her salvation. It’s not the women having hope that is ugly, but instead, the ugliness is in the cynical hope sold to them by institutions that promise what they won’t deliver.
Dorsey never patronizes his subjects by lapsing from empathy to condescension. Sympathy can often be a temporary license we give ourselves to gawk at someone’s misery. While Dorsey doesn’t shy away from presenting the sad circumstances of someone’s life, he also never infringes on their agency by flattening them into one-dimensional victims. Even the aforementioned cancer survivor:
says we are all ravenous locusts
at the same overcrowded trough
as he explains his theories on women
We can only imagine what these “theories” might be, or what he might be expressing with the locusts comment. What is sure is that these complicating aspects of the man’s personality play against any impulse to use his cancer as a thin premise for sympathy. He is not the perfect victim, just a human whose cancer is part of his story.
Dorsey’s poems are all honest reports on the damage we all live with, and whether this damage is a circumstance of birth or self-inflicted, the damage is inextricable from our stories. For example, Dorsey bluntly spells this out in his poem “Young Man”:
david
i’m not saying
you were no good
just rotten on the inside
like a bag of sour apples
who left us too young.
Dorsey does not fear pinpointing the rot inside this young man, but also avoids any kind of judgment on him or blame on anyone else. It is taboo to speak ill of the dead, but our culture’s fear of this taboo often leads us to invent a fictitious version of the dead that paints them as blameless and brightsides their darkness. This is more of a dishonor than providing an accurate record of the life they led because it erases all their choices and every mark they made, good or bad. It doesn’t remember the dead; it forgets them immediately and entirely.
This leads me back to what I refer to as John Dorsey’s balanced empathy. Empathy doesn’t mean excusing or ignoring the faults and failings of an individual, but understanding the trauma residing in someone’s scars, including the self-inflicted. Dorsey’s balanced empathy calls attention to the ugliness of the sour apples rotting in all of us, but in just a few words, he makes the pain of carrying this rot momentarily beautiful.
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Sundown at the Redneck Carnival is available via Spartan Press
About the Reviewer: Chase Dimock is the Managing Editor of As It Ought To Be Magazine. His debut book of poetry, Sentinel Species, was published in 2020.
Real
Side-winding around the half-cars though
the man seeing me looking yells Don't look!
I have seen the coat-covered passenger's
arm. Real? Is it real?
—I must keep going. It is real.
As real as watching your neighbor's house
burst into flames. How fast
disaster consumes others. Shocking,
our relief—I must keep going
or run the risk of becoming
real to someone else.
About the Author: Matt Dennison is the author of Kind Surgery, from Urtica Press (Fr.) and Waiting for Better, from Main Street Rag Press. His work has appeared in Verse Daily, Rattle, Bayou Magazine, Redivider, Natural Bridge, The Spoon River Poetry Review and Cider Press Review, among others. He has also made short films with Michael Dickes, Swoon, Marie Craven and Jutta Pryor.
Image Credit:Elihu Vedder “Study for “The Fates Gathering in the Stars”, 1884-1887. Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington
Traveling on Our Stomachs
Leaving the excess of old-world Utrecht,
all gargoyles, staggeringly high churches
with their proverbial lesson in perspective,
arched doorways folding into arched hallways
like bellows on a monochromatic accordion,
I enter the gray-gray of its New Town: Massive,
hard-edged concrete slabs of cold contemporary
Dutch architecture dedicated to function over form,
utility over any hint of Rococo. I’m drawn to an
Edward Hopper-lit café, empty save the silent
server who presents a slab of creamy yellow cheese,
flaky golden-dusted brioche its tenderness cradling
the bright orange yolk of the freshest egg, satiny hot
coffee in a white-white cup, the perfect American
travel memory on a gray-gray day in Utrecht.
About the Author: Diana Rosen is a poet, flash writer, and essayist with work in online and print journals in the U.S., the U.K., Australia, Canada, and India. Her first book of flash and poetry, “High Stakes & Expectations,” was released in spring 2022 from thetinypublisher.com Diana lives in Los Angeles where she writes website content on food and beverage. To read more of her work, please visit www.authory.com/dianarosen
Image Credit:Édouard Manet “The Brioche” (1870) Public domain image courtesy of Artvee
DADDY, WE’RE ENGAGED
His expression is like a crab
moving sideways and backwards
and forwards at will.
The eyes, the nose,
the mouth, are as restless as small dogs.
They can’t settle on a frown.
And a smile is seemingly beyond them.
We stand before him,
our fingers clutching and unclutching,
together elsewhere,
but insecurely tethered here.
We came to tell him
but it feels as if we’re asking his permission.
I know my own mind.
You know yours.
But that’s still one mind short.
About the Author: John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident, recently published in Sheepshead Review, Stand, Poetry Salzburg Review and Hollins Critic. Latest books, “Leaves On Pages” “Memory Outside The Head” and “Guest Of Myself” are available through Amazon. Work upcoming in Ellipsis, Blueline and International Poetry Review.
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Image Credit: Versuch einer Naturgeschichte der Krabben und Krebse: Berlin ;Bei Gottlieb August Lange,1782-1804. Image courtesy of the Biodiversity Heritage Library
Author’s Note: These poems, along with several hundred others, are part of a larger erasure collection entitled Pocatello Wildflower, which examines the words of a group of Idaho writers who worked primarily from the 1970’s to the 1990’s, including the late Bruce Embree, who really got the ball rolling in my head and heart, with a few still working today. It is my great hope that folks will be interested in the original writers work, in addition to my own. Pocatello Wildflower will be available in 2023 from Crisis Chronicles Press. Thanks for reading.
My Parents
strangers raised us
in ditchbank weeds
on combat rations
it was love
& bruises
no pity
in the blowing dust.
Moving Past the Fetish
last year’s growing storm
a lost friend
famous people
not humping boulders
like me
in the foolish
september moon.
The River of Lovers
could burn enough nostalgia
to find comfort
in our past
a whirl of wind.
Rosie Died
goats
river rock
his father never blinked
feet first
alley shadows
lilacs
a bad dream
catches in his throat.
Pocatello Tattoo
i lost my horse
my body
a boxcar
of coaldust
pocatello
pocatello
pocatello
this country of shame
died in the trees
rolled west
in shoshone
in boise
in pocatello
pocatello
pocatello
april whiskey
on the spot
where the sun goes down
like a red-hot needle.
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), Which Way to the River: Selected Poems 2016-2020 (OAC Books, 2020), Afterlife Karaoke (Crisis Chronicles Press, 2021) and Sundown at the Redneck Carnival, (Spartan Press, 2022).. 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.
After surgery
he surfaces drowsy
from anesthesia
sees his wife
by his bedside
reaches out
his hand feels
her shoulder blade
relieved he sighs
“No wings!
I am alive!”
About the Author: Agnes Vojta grew up in Germany and now lives in Rolla, Missouri where she teaches physics at Missouri S&T and hikes the Ozarks. She is the author of Porous Land (Spartan Press, 2019) and The Eden of Perhaps (Spartan Press, 2020), and her poems have appeared in a variety of magazines.
Stay a Spell
The cicadas kissed the curves of my ears,
pale fingers fighting nothing but air and the thinness of wings.
Chop, shift, I split the wood again
chop, shift, the butterscotch chips catching in the frays
of an old knitted coat.
Skillet fried dinner blends to skillet fried dessert—
What was that?
A rustle of leaves yields sunny-sides filled with shell
and the squirrel chuckles up his chestnuts.
He picks his shells with ease.
The warm fire deepens the orange of my hair
and blushes the apples of my cheeks.
Oxygen and black smoke trickle through my lungs—
carbon dioxide bleaching the fumes clear.
We need more tinder.
My eyes meet a doe dancing behind the flame.
Thin ankles locked straight to the left and chin whiskers
quirked to the right; she stood firm.
Who was I to stay a spell in her living room?
I didn’t even take off my shoes.
About the Author: Hannah Bagley lives and attends the University of North Georgia in Dahlonega, Georgia. An English literature major and German minor, she has also been published in The Chestatee Review. Hannah draws inspiration from her upbringing in Southern Appalachia and its rich history. She plans to continue poetry in the pursuit of nature, life, and expression of the human experience.
Image Credit: Winslow Homer “Campfire” (1880) Public domain image courtesy of Artvee
“New Highway Promises Development for Local Communities”
The Starkville Daily News
The new highway skirts struggling towns obscured
by second-growth—black jack saplings, pin oak,
scrub pine decked with hand-struck signs for still-born
cafes, yard sales, deer skinners, promises
of God’s wrath, purchases non-refundable.
I wonder who could live in these small towns.
I tell the trees, Not me. I still look, though,
still try to see how, within their limits,
mysteries keep them seething. Having failed
with farming, having wheeled to fail at retail,
their faith’s in resurrection. New highways.
In buyers who’ll slab jack foundations,
true frames, gingerbread all the worn storefronts.
Paint the whole into a groggy, pastel wet dream
with awnings, stratocumulus, lighting subdued
to shade by day, illuminate by night.
The latest iterations in gutter
technology, sewers gussied up.
Rains falling like money will hurry away,
down to the channelized river. Its banks
will blossom with summer homes. Angelic
water skiers’ wash will lap the cut bank,
will rinse mulish roots, will swamp the hand-struck
signs I’d have placed there: “No trespassing.”
“Free rooster.” “Chickens, fresh brown eggs for sale.”
About the Author: Samuel Prestridge, a post-aspirational man, lives and works in Athens, Georgia. He sometimes plays acoustic blues and jazz in local bars under an assumed name. He has been published in Literary Imagination, The Arkansas Review, Southern Humanities Review, As It Ought to Be, Better Than Starbucks, Autumn Skies, among others.
Image Credit: Marion Post Walcott “Signs advertising liquor stores are seen frequently along all Kentucky highways. South of Bardstown” (1940) Public domain image courtesy of the Library of Congress
As It Ought To Be 