Issue #33.3 Joshua C. Pipkins, Jason Ryberg, Lee Potts
A Poem by Joshua C. Pipkins
Yet Though I Must Lose My Life
The nightingale sings thought Gawain. He made himself still listened to its distant elegy.
All is white o’er the fields. All is angels’ feathers eager to embrace for heavenly price.
Steady my feet oh Great Lord Gawain prayed. If he were to move now he would flee.
Mountainous stood The Chapel forever untouched by snow. Green vines swallowed its walls and ground themselves like hungry teeth.
Steady my heart oh Great Lord. Let me go bravely to this Spring.
He unfastened the girdle once given to him as a shield against Death and went humbly into that Chapel with the nightingale’s song upon his lips. ________________________________________________________________________________________
Joshua C. Pipkins is a pushcart nominated poet based in Memphis, Tennessee.
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Two Poems by Jason Ryberg
Hunting for Marlon Brando
June in Missouri is like a primeval jungle where someone, somewhere is playing Caruso on an old timey gramophone while hunting for Marlon Brando.
Sliding Down the Straight Razor of Heaven
The summer air is boiling over and roiling with the black shadows of buzzards and crows, and the early evening sky is a bright, neon lip- stick smear of orange and red (with a thin stripe of coagulated blood that has pooled on the frayed and tattered tree line (the sun, already, having slid all the way down the straight razor of Heaven (much like the fabled philosopher’s stone plunging to the bottom of a well), as it does at the end of each day, in order to be baptized in the black river of the void).
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Jason Ryberg is the author of twenty-five books of poetry, six screenplays, a few short stories, a box full of folders, notebooks and scraps of paper that could one day be (loosely) construed as a novel, and countless love letters (never sent). He is currently an artist-in-residence at both The Prospero Institute of Disquieted P/o/e/t/i/c/s and the Osage Arts Community, and is an editor and designer at Spartan Books. His work has appeared in As it Ought to Be, Up the Staircase Quarterly, Thimble Literary Magazine, I-70 Review, Main Street Rag, The Arkansas Review and various other journals and anthologies. His latest collection of poems is “And When There Was No Crawfish, We Ate Sand (co-authored with Abraham Smith, Justin Hamm and John Dorsey (OAC Press, 2025)). He lives part-time in Kansas City, MO with a rooster named Little Red and a Billy-goat named Giuseppe, and part-time somewhere in the Ozarks, near the Gasconade River, where there are also many strange and wonderful woodland critters.
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A Poem by Lee Potts
The king of the birds goes to bed
He stretches to smooth out the wild air around him, recites a psalm, goes over what was lost, what was found, the soft, brown apples rotting in the grass, mutters What needs to go, needs to go.
The ghost of his great-great-grandfather comes back again to share new verses from the ancient ballad about the way he tricked rain into falling and stopped the great fire from taking his kingdom. They are the same new verses every time he visits.
This morning, he saw a yellowjacket climb into a soda can and, after a while, stop humming. It’s terrible for him to dream all night of dying enclosed with wings suddenly sticky and useless
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Lee Potts is founder and editor-in-chief of Stone Circle Review. His work has appeared in Glass: A Journal of Poetry, The Shore, The Night Heron Barks, Rust + Moth, UCity Review, Moist Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. He is the author of two chapbooks. The most recent, We’ll Miss the Stars in the Morning (Bottlecap Press), was published in 2024. He lives just outside of Philadelphia with his wife and daughter.
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