Issue #33.4 Damon Hubbs, Sharon Kennedy-Nolle, Mark J. Mitchell
A Poem by Damon Hubbs
St Elizabeth
At the corner & he, praying to the muse in Sunday school when Elizabeth bit me on the arm. The psychiatric ward has a skull shrine. This is east of Prague, of course. Which is six hours ahead and friendless. I feel old.
I’ll call her St Elizabeth. We fell over ourselves. Too bad I never learned to paint. The incalculable equation of heaven and hell has me dying right. Imperious twilight high as my pal Odysseus.
Something marvelous with loaves and fishes. She cooked. She said it in ten languages. Since you want me to tell you about myself I’m going to make you happy. The plumage on the Potomac is like a feast-day bouquet
—God-step. Brain fever. The rock drill hammers. I can hear it like a row of rooms with different lighting. Scarlet Tanager; Indigo Bunting. Charioteering with excess: How, and where, do we begin? ________________________________________________________________________________________
Damon Hubbs is a poet from New England. His work has appeared in Hobart, Apocalypse Confidential, Farewell Transmission, A Thin Slice of Anxiety, Horror Sleaze Trash, The Gorko Gazette, The Literary Underground, and elsewhere. He is the author of the poetry collections Nighttime Logic and Venus at the Arms Fair. He is an editor at Blood+Honey.
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A Poem by Sharon Kennedy-Nolle
Two Confessions
I am staring at the face, plastered on telephone poles,
--Geeky, glasses, acned smirk, bushy hair— Another ginger, a red-haired boy, missing for days.
Neighbors curb-cluster, talking quietly to police, as we comb Fort Hill Cemetery graves.
It’s just as we did for you, son. When you lit out “to see the full moon rise over the water”
On that rainy, rainy night That canceled your scent, leaving the police dogs yawning.
During those know-nothing weeks, I smilingly confessed that I was at peace if you were just at rest
In the bottom, say, of some unknown still pool Surrendered to something the sediment would settle. . .
What a necessary lie.
But the bloodhounds bring this boy home, From hiding out under a school desk.
Just pranking, a joke gone bad, no harm intended says the relieved police chief
In this turn to tender September, snakes still warm on sidewalks,
When I hear the news, I admit I was half-hoping they wouldn’t find him
At least not alive.
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Appointed the Poet Laureate of Sullivan County for 2022-2024, Sharon Kennedy-Nolle was awarded a Poet Laureate Fellowship for 2023-2024 from the Academy of American Poets. A graduate of Vassar College, she received an MFA from the Writers’ Workshop as well as a doctoral degree in nineteenth-century American literature from the University of Iowa. She also holds MAs from the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University and New York University. In addition to scholarly publications, her poetry has appeared in many journals. Her chapbook, Black Wick: Selected Elegies was a semi-finalist for the 2018 Tupelo Snowbound Chapbook Contest. Chosen as the 2020 Chapbook Editor’s Pick by Variant Literature Press, Black Wick: Selected Elegies was published in 2021. Kennedy-Nolle was winner of the New Ohio Review’s 2021 creative writing contest. “Not Waving” was chosen as a 2025 semi-finalist for Lighthouse and for Long Leaf Presses, a 2021 finalist for the Black Lawrence Press’s St. Lawrence Book Award, a 2021 and 2022 semifinalist for the University of Wisconsin Poetry Series' Brittingham and Felix Pollak Prizes, and a 2022 semifinalist for the Two Sylvias Press’ Wilder Prize and for the Brick Road Poetry Contest. Kennedy-Nolle lives and teaches in New York. She is currently working on a larger poetry project devoted to exploring the lives of trauma survivors based on her travels in SE Asia this winter.
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A Poem by Mark J. Mitchell
Hidden Talent
Two days after the rain came back she practiced walking on water. It’s not something that you’d notice, but her feet never touched pavement.
She practiced. Walking on water poses its own danger. She won’t fall, she knows, but she could fly off and lose her place on the planet,
It’s not something that she’d notice at first, but it happened before— She still worries about that lost child but not the husband she forgot.
She keeps her feet close to pavement and her dance steps in her dreaming life. She won’t practice if it floods, just when there’s rain a day or two.
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Mark J. Mitchell has been a working poet for 50 years. His latest collection is Something To Be. A novel, A Book of Lost Songs, was recently published by Histria Books. He’s fond of baseball, Louis Aragon, Dante, and his wife, activist Joan Juster. He lives in San Francisco where he points out pretty things.
He can be found on Bluesky @MJMitchellwriter
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