Tag: Poetry

Daniel J. Flore III: “They gave me the last rites”

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They gave me the last rites

walking out of a restaurant
I hear a family saying grace
like they were giving me the last rites
they pray in the name of the father, son, and holy spirit
I think I’m going to get shot or something walking out the door
It’s like trying not to step on butterfly wings to stay alive

I am in my deathbed
my family is all gathered round
crumpled tissues are clouds of heaven
I want to speak
but have nothing to say but the tears
I wiped on my wrist
there is a stupid fluorescent light there
hanging like the tease of life
I am going to walk the shorelines I decide
and learn about death
in glistening waves
somewhere in Cape May
the closest I can get to Galilee
Grammy’s ghost in the ocean smiling at me
but there’s nothing here
just sand
and I didn’t even make it out of bed

there are birds at my burial plot
and I smile like I’m taking a train to my mom’s
but I keep hearing this opera music
I am in a garden
with petals like wings
that wrap around me
I’m alone
the past
plays in the music
like chandelier tears
leading me into its sadness
deeper and deeper
until I can’t hear the music at all
just the silence after it

 

 

About the Author: Daniel J. Flore III has had many writings published and is the author of 4 books of poetry from GenZ Publishing. The latest is titled Pink Marigold Rays.

 

Image Credit: Col. Henry Stuart Wortley “Study of Clouds” (1863) Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program.

Jason Baldinger: “time went the way of the buffalo”

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time went the way of the buffalo (for diane wahto)

I know wichita
from a gas station
overlooking the interstate

a jaw dropping sun
rise over the flint hills
I pulled my hoodie
against october

with eight hundred miles
ahead, one last
gasp of wichita
before wagons west

it’s sad we never met
we should have had breakfast
but time went the way of the buffalo

I would have loved to hear
in person, your story
of marching five miles in kalamazoo

you and your friend
against the vietnam war
you and your friend
all dressed up in high heels

 

 

About the Author: Jason Baldinger is bored with bios. He’s from Pittsburgh and misses roaming around the country writing poems. His newest book is A Threadbare Universe (Kung Fu Treachery Press) with The Afterlife is A Hangover (Stubborn Mule Press) coming soon. His work has been published widely across print journals and online. You can hear him read his work on Bandcamp and on lp’s by the bands The Gotobeds and Theremonster.

 

More Poetry by Jason Baldinger:

This Ghostly Ambience

It was a Golden Time

Beauty is a Rare Thing

 

Image Credit: Carol M. Highsmith “Mounted buffalo head at the Hotel Paisano in Marfa, Texas” (2014) The Library of Congress

Agnes Vojta: “Love, After Fifty Years”

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Love, after fifty years,

is an old woman
riding the bus
for an hour
to a nursing home.

Her husband does not speak.
She does not have much
to say, but today his fingers
closed around her hand.

She stays until the end
of the allowed time.
She will have just missed
the bus. She wanders

the cobblestone streets
of the small town.
Most shops closed at five.
A bakery is still open.

She buys a cookie
to eat on the way.
It is autumn, the dusk
falls early. She rides

home through the dark.
When she steps into her empty
house, she hopes
she will get to do this
again soon.

 

 

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.

 

More By Agnes Vojta:

Legend

Sisyphus Calls It Quits

Flotsam

 

Image Credit: Jack Delano “Old woman waiting for a bus in front of her house. Newtown, Connecticut” (1940) The Library of Congress (Public Domain)

John Dorsey: “The Prettiest Girl in Byron, Missouri”

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The Prettiest Girl in Byron, Missouri

hasn’t seen the sun in months
she sits cross legged in the rain
waiting for her turn to dance

scratching out the image
of a paper heart
in the mud

it’s the only way
she can remember
what her grandmother’s face
even looked like now

water rolls down her tin roof
in search of deliverance

overgrown weeds hiss in the wind
wrapping around her toes
like jump rope

squealing in an empty field.

 

 

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 Press, 2017),Your Daughter’s Country (Blue Horse Press, 2019),Which Way to the River: Selected Poems 2016-2020 (OAC Books, 2020) and The Prettiest Girl at the Dance (Blue Horse Press, 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.

 

More By John Dorsey:

Anthony Bourdain Crosses the River of the Dead

Punk Rock at 45

Perpetual Motion

 

Image Credit: Frances Benjamin Johnston “Port Tobacco Houses, Port Tobacco, Charles County, Maryland” (1936-1937) The Library of Congress.

Tim Peeler: “Last Poem Before Zoloft”

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Last Poem Before Zoloft

Is that an ink pen or a bullet?
I can’t tell, you know how long
Are some of those shells.
I see a teenaged boy child
Listening to “Any Major Dude”
Thinking of when to come out.
Outside the rain drums
The triple pane basement window.
Inside a half-crippled black lab
Watches a baseball game.
I ran through what seemed like
An ocean of time to get here
To find myself invisible.
The ages will be the ages
As the rat snake snugs himself
Around the water pipe in the crawlspace.
What do you mean, how will we go on?
We will wear goggles.
We will carry spears.

 

 

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: Robert Shymanski: “Attic, crawl space, view east and southeast from north center (part 1 of triptych view) – Hegeler Carus Mansion, 1307 Seventh Street, La Salle, La Salle County, IL”(2008) The Library of Congress

Michael Masarof: “Holy Girl”

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Holy Girl

She parked other people’s cars
We walked on the Long Island Sound
The boats crushing the shore
She fixed teeth
She was in the mouth all day
Open
Close
Turn
She crushed the clutch
Turned the wheel all the way
Motor off
Shoving that steel pick deep into the gums
I howled
With delight
When we walked the night righteous
The limbs cautious
Air ripe I fell

 

 

About the Author: Michael Masarof is a writer and director born in New York and residing in Los Angeles. Michael received his MFA in Film Directing from New York University’s Maurice Kanbar Institute of Film & Television’s Graduate film program at the Tisch School of The Arts, where he was the recipient of the Jane Rosenthal Scholarship and the Warner Bros. Production Grant. Michael’s short film You Should Have The Body won the first place prize at the International Munich Festival of Film Schools. It also screened as a special presentation at the Berlinale, as well as on Channel 3SAT in Germany. First Love, Michael’s debut feature film that the LA Times called intimate, is currently streaming on Amazon.

 

Image Credit: Carol M. Highsmith “Looking out over the marshes in Long Island Sound near Westport, Connecticut” (2011) The Library of Congress

Joseph Mills: When the Dance Instructor Says “Follow Your Partner’s Lead”

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When the Dance Instructor Says “Follow Your Partner’s Lead”

Ignore the imperative,
the possessive “your,”
the complicated questions
of trust and simply ask,
how you can both
“follow your partner’s lead.”

Wouldn’t that be
an Escher painting,
a Moebius strip?

I’m following you
following me
following you
following…

and perhaps that’s the point.
Most in relationships
understand the ebb and flow
that occurs, the changing
of places and leads
over the day and days and years.
Of what good is it
to assign positions
to the wave and the water?
Which hand is responsible
for what happens
when hand meets hand?

 

 

About the Author, Joseph Mills: A faculty member at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, I have published six collections of poetry, most recently “Exit, pursued by a bear” which consists of poems triggered by stage directions in Shakespeare. My book “This Miraculous Turning” was awarded the North Carolina Roanoke-Chowan Award for Poetry for its exploration of race and family. Last year I published my debut work of fiction, “Bleachers: 54 linked fictions” which takes place at a youth soccer game.

 

Image Credit: Russell Lee “Round dance. Pie Town, New Mexico. Among people where square dancing is the usual form of dancing, regular ball room dancing is called “round dancing” (1940) The Library of Congress

Nadia Arioli: “On “I Walk Without Echo” by Kay Sage”

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(You can view Sage’s painting “I Walk Without Echo” here)

 

 

On “I Walk Without Echo” by Kay Sage

To be a woman is to be caustic
with no power. To instigate

but not to burn. A bellyless earthquake,
a doctor’s bill that goes on and on.

They say we were made second.
Helpmate, companion, never the main

story. A plot point in a chapter
about blood. We go back,

the feminine parts of ourselves,
fetus Matryoshka dolls.

My mother said I looked like one
as a baby. I thought she meant I was

one. I learned in an encyclopedia
I was right. My mother was in utero

with ova. An ovum became half
of me. I’ve still got most my eggs.

To be second but half already there
and while carrying half of the next feels

like a mathematical anomaly,
the kind that would fill a volume.

I sat holding up my dress, bent into three
points: head, knees, one between. Lips

out like shellfish. I want to walk
without echo. I wait on a porcelain ear.

I picture it—perfectly round O’s
of red. Such a bright color in the dark.

I will it: I walk without echo.
Bleed, damn you.

 

 

About the Author: Nadia Arioli (nee Wolnisty) is the founder and editor in chief of Thimble Literary Magazine. Their work has appeared or is forthcoming in Spry, SWWIM, Apogee, Penn Review, McNeese Review, Kissing Dynamite, Bateau, Heavy Feather Review, Whale Road Review, SOFTBLOW, and others. They have chapbooks from Cringe-Worthy Poetry Collective, Dancing Girl Press, and a full-length from Spartan.

 

 

Mj Taylor: “my drunken alibi”

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my drunken alibi
cd not pass

erased from her life
like chalk

a best friend
a spirit intertwined

gone like
the setting sun

it’s been two years
& the words hang

heavy on my lips
the would-have-been’s

the old man’s regret
like a halo

the snow falls in
nebraska & i cant help

but think of
you in this cold

in mill
valley

 

About the Author: Mj Taylor is a poet living in NE. He has been nominated for the Pushcart prize as well as Best of the Net. He has two chapbooks, “Rattled” (kleft Jaw Press) & Skee-Ball at the Holy Arcade (River Dog). He can be reached at mktaylorjr93@gmail.com

 

Image Credit: Arthur Rothstein “Melting snow. Hayes County, Nebraska” (1940) The Library of Congress

Jonel Abellanosa: “Anilius”

Posted on by Chase Dimock

..

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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.

.

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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.

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More by Jonel Abellanosa:

Jaguar

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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.