TRAMPOLINE

Issue #19.1 Three Poems by Jeffrey Thompson

Hunting Season

It was just your luck to be a buck crashing  through plate glass  slipping on the slick floors  of c-stores and off-sales crashing down  overcrowded aisles knocking over displays  of Jack and Coors, racks of Guns & Ammo far from the riprap, the tall weeds and falling trees, the gardens and backyards, home.

The Yips

1.

Yes I teared up as per instruction my eyes followed the dots of light back and forth, back and forth and the camera pulled away from the traumatic event. I chose the emergency room scene  showing her, now conscious, writhing on the bed, hooked to an IV,  with the impossible blood alcohol content. At the time it was not bearable, no, I got that much right, but soon enough, of course, the bar of lights, the awful movie,  are nudged to the side, displaced by the nagging, mundane concerns:  Am I doing this right? How much longer? Do I even have 200 bucks?  

2.

Sure I closed my eyes and picked a thought  to place on a leaf floating down a stream. That lasted half a minute, max.  Account for the sadness of real streams  that can’t be found again, oases except for the flies, streams you wanted to rest by but the sky was clouding over and the hike back was long, or you brought a book  you never opened, or the park closed at dusk. This will all have to be explained when the New Age music stops and the lights go on.

3.

For my infusion music I picked Another Green World. It was a matter of waiting for the dissociative state, the sense of detachment,  defense mechanisms broken down, the unconscious unfiltered,  transpersonal experiences to be shared in all their pain.   True, I did not feel like moving, gravity was a comfortable blanket,  time was there but across the room, barely paying attention.  The moment came to get lost but I’d been here before,  on the floor listening to Eno, tranquilized by loneliness. I know I blew it but where could I go? The nurse was watching.  I hated to disappoint her. That’s my story, anyway.

Postcard: Minneapolis

Leamington, Hotel of Presidents, your twin has been found out, become empty, a tomb of rubble, a Parking Lot. Missketched, on soft pavement, that floorplan of stale geometry,

an early masterpiece of organization, has become yours, exclusively, Leamington. The Curtis has fallen; you have become brittle, fixed: Home of a Perpetual Reunion. Leamington, trying to leave (10th Street exit)

I see you have encrusted an old woman. Her hair is blue on its way to black. She has worn a path from the Wakiki Room to the Salon, considered her home. Her step is careful. Her days are numbered.

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Jeffrey Thompson was raised in Fargo, North Dakota, and educated at the University of Iowa and Cornell Law School. He lives in Phoenix, where he practices public interest law. His work has appeared in journals including North Dakota Quarterly, The Main Street Rag, ONE ART, Maudlin House, Hole in the Head Review, Funicular, and New World Writing Quarterly. His hobbies include reading, hiking, photography, listening to Leonard Cohen, and doom-scrolling the ruins of Twitter.

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Issue #19.2 A Poem by Stephanie K. Merrill

Requiems & Resurrections

It must be late summer now these hill country fires  spreading the smell of wild & lonely all around us.  The drought-scent presses in on the deer.

Starting a fire is as easy as an empty glass  sitting on a table in the sun, the paper napkin flaming &-- always when I think of you 

love still burns  the flames of the cherry laurels swaying you on my outside living on my inside.

I read about a woman who inhaled a fir seed that began to grow inside of her. At first the oncologist  thought it was a tumor, but a tree was growing in her lung.

Now villages are filled with vigilant everyone  searching for fire inside standing among fires outside &-- it’s easy to miss the miracle of the guacamole so early in the mornings.

I once grew an avocado tree in a jar of water toothpicks holding the seed in place roots spreading, leaves sprouting &--

here we queue for the jalapeno witches at daybreak taco-standing for the apocalypse knowing that the billionaires  will steal all the water & we keep asking 

But will they know how to be a tree?

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Stephanie K. Merrill (she / her) is a retired high school English teacher. Her poems have been published in The Rise Up Review; Feral: A Journal of Poetry and Art; UCity Review; Moist Poetry Journal; Amethyst Review; Dear Poetry Journal; One Art, and elsewhere. Stephanie K. Merrill is a Pushcart Prize nominee. She lives in Austin, Texas.

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Issue #19.3 Two Poems by Mark J. Mitchell

VISITING ANGELS

Je vis assis, te qu’un ange aux mains d’un barbier (I live seated, like an angel in the hands of a barber)

—Arthur Rimbaud Oraison du soir

Two angels in a barbershop watching hair fall.

They speak softly in French kissing their sibilants.

The blue-eyed one  knows the prophet is not coming today

because  his horoscope tells him to stay away.

The sad one wishes he could smoke but it’s California.

WHILE COOKING

Dante never tasted a potato. Pasta didn’t tempt his holy tongue. Nicotine’s evil ghost plotted somewhere across an ocean, under a sun unimagined. His long dream had missing pieces—seams that gapped. His world was so young.

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Mark J. Mitchell has worked in hospital kitchens, fast food, wine and spirits retail, conventions, tourism and warehouses. He has also been a working poet for over forty years. He has published two novels, Knight Prisoner and The Magic War. Another is on the way. He is the author of several chapbooks and poetry collections. Born in Chicago and grew up in southern California. At UC Santa Cruz he studied writing and Medieval literature under Raymond Carver, George Hitchcock and Robert M. Durling. He is very fond of baseball, Louis Aragon, Miles Davis, Kafka and Dante. He lives in San Francisco with his wife, the activist and documentarian, Joan Juster where he made his marginal living pointing out pretty things. Now, he is seeking work once again.

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Issue #19.4 A Poem by Dorothy Lune

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Dorothy Lune is a Yorta Yorta poet, born in Australia. Her work has appeared in Pinhole Poetry & more. She is compiling a manuscript, can be found online @dorothylune, & has a substack: https://dorothylune.substack.com/ 

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Issue #19.5 Two Poems by Alan Altany

Septuagenarian Memoirs No. 1

Like an old, broken and repaired
wooden beggar’s bowl, worn
thin by ages of handling,
I find myself cracked and
slightly leaking, bearing scars
visible and inherently invisible,
a flesh & spirited bowl of memories,
hungers, and echoes of shadows.
Yesterday I was young and insane
from habitually recurring wounds,
and today aged and slightly surreal
from an elastic stretch of solitude
and a quietly eccentric faith
in a mysterious love emptied
of itself in the art of loving.
The weight of my wisdom
is meager, but contrasted
to myself as a young man,
it is the density of worlds.

Sobriety

Every addict’s gnawing dream,
impossible to clearly conceive,
an absurdity to be hoped for,
a vision blinded by old weeds,
sobriety a blessed emptying
of all the staggering noise
abusing a forgotten soul
& harassing a confused heart.
Sobriety a shadow at noon,
a bearing of stigmatas
in unbearable winter.
Sobriety as steps to infinity
backdropping hell’s fire
flaming and flaring
every addictive moment;
a glimpse of a spring
Sunday afternoon
doing nothing at all
but beginning to love
every bird in flight.

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Alan Altany is a partially retired, septuagenarian college professor of religious studies and theology. He has been a factory worker, swineherd on a farm, hotel clerk, lawn maintenance worker, high school teacher, small magazine of poetry editor, director of religious education for churches, truck driver, novelist, among other things. In 2022, he published a book of poetry entitled A Beautiful Absurdity (https://www.alanaltany.com/).

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Issue #19.6 A Poem by Elizabeth Porter

My students reported sirens 

in the bathroom and I immediately thought of those personal alarms I clip to my children who walk a long distance to school. There have  been two shootings in the past month in my neighborhood. But no, I arrived in the bathroom to find two fully-feathered  Sirens with tails like trout and angel wings.

Their lips formed elongated ohs, fat and glossy pink. I knew what would come next, after all, I’d taught the Odyssey in the previous quarter. My students huddled behind me like over-sized 14-year-old human-shaped ducklings. I would have sprouted wings or riot shields if I were designing my own character.

Ironically, I’ve not been trained to deal with this kind of situation, though I also was never trained to deal with phone calls from angry drunk parents or to apply band aids to popped back zits or to help a teenager cope with their first broken heart as it lay pulsing on a desk.

“Cover your ears and roll out,” I shouted, but the words had snagged in my throat and all that came out was a song and I was singing with the sirens. Or at least, this is how parents must see me: an existential threat to youth who hold in their hoodies a more persuasive intoxicant than any lesson on comma splices. But I wasn’t singing, I was expanding, my body a barrier once more.

As we escaped the lavatories, I heard fire sirens in the distance and wondered if it was just another drill. I’m just counting down to the end of the school year or the weekend. It depends on the day.

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Elizabeth Porter wanders, writes, and teaches middle school in south-central Pennsylvania. Her work has been published in Jersey Devil Press and is forthcoming in Eunoia Review.

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Issue #19.7 Three Poems by Millie Tullis

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Millie Tullis is a poet and folklorist from Northern Utah. Her poetry has been published in Sugar House Review, Rock & Sling, Cimarron Review, Juked, Ninth Letter, and elsewhere. She is the Editor-in-Chief of Psaltery & Lyre, an online journal pushing the borders of the sacred and the secular. You can find her on twitter @millie_tullis.

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Issue #19.8 A Poem by Paul Ilechko

Urban Water Sonnet 

Your mother’s teeth are clenched in astonishment as  you make your way through the mysterious city     a place she has never seen before     nor expected to ever visit  it having no relation to the life that she has lived    a life of oxygen tanks and birdsong     of a drunken man sleeping away his years until he reached a point where there was no reason to ever wake again     and so she has lived a life nursing a grudge     every bit as fiercely as the way in which she nursed that man     hoping beyond hope to restore him to something that resembled a life knowing that it would always be too late     so now  you penetrate to the very heart of this vast metropolis sculling quietly on the wide waters of a great river  praying that your boats are still not visible from the bank.

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Paul Ilechko is British American poet and occasional songwriter who lives with his partner in Lambertville, NJ. His work has appeared in many journals, including The Night Heron Barks, Tampa Review, Iron Horse Literary Review, Sleet Magazine, and The Inflectionist Review. He has also published several chapbooks.

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Issue #19.9 A Poem by Russell Rowland

Dependencies

In the course of “constitutionals” I generally come upon Jill bundled up, seated outside the facility where we live, puffing the next cigarette du jour.

Voice and face attest to the progression.

We visit, speak of weathers, the state of the premises and whatever—

then I walk on, thinking of things we discover we are unable to do without, even when they show the world by what means we are going to leave it.

I have grown somewhat dependent on love. I trust its forbearing arms to cradle me away from this life, unto itself.

Jill will go up in smoke, as incense from the votive she has lit— all need satisfied for something more than what good health could offer.

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Seven-time Pushcart Prize nominee Russell Rowland writes from New Hampshire’s Lakes Region, where he has judged high-school Poetry Out Loud competitions.  His work appears in Except for Love: New England Poets Inspired by Donald Hall (Encircle Publications), and “Covid Spring, Vol. 2” (Hobblebush Books). His latest poetry book, Wooden Nutmegs, is available from Encircle Publications.

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Issue #19.10 A Poem by Susan Johnson

The Story Of Our Lives

The river is all current, all fast lane,
while the trail is a question mark
winding through spider traps that wrap 

our faces with gauze, clouding our gaze.
So goes the Story Of Our Lives, part
rush, part reckoning. Like DNA, 

the Story Of Our Lives is full of errors
and repetitions; the trail that follows
the river follows the trail and neither 

knows what’s around the next bend.
Yet the Story Of Our Lives continues
charging ahead only to circle back, 

to damp wood that smokes but never
burns, to a series of caves that keep
caving in leading to more shadows 

to explore. Above the mantel a painting
of a mantel. The Story Of Our Lives
likes to appear in control, carefully 

framed, even as it wants to explode.
Accelerating around switchbacks, it has
the road to itself. I could go anywhere, 

it says. I could go home. It’s a story so
it wants to know how it ends. It’s a story
so it wants to know that it never ends.

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Susan Johnson's poems have recently appeared in The Meadow, Dash, Front Range Review, and Aji. She lives in South Hadley MA. 

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Issue #19.11 A Poem by S. T. Brant

Out of the Dolor Springs the Nascent 

Find your freedom in the greyness legioning life; nowhere’s silver but the Dionyistic instants  conscience fractures respitefully to soul. Life split in to tint the dreams that fancy light, the dark-gold Apollo meeting Hades, riding him from earth, the new tyrant, Time’s new Captain.

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S. T. Brant lives in Las Vegas where he teaches high school English and Journalism. His debut collection Melody in Exile was published in 2022. His work has appeared and is forthcoming in numerous journals including Honest Ulsterman, EcoTheo, Timber, Rain Taxi, Ocean State Review, Green Mountains Review, Ekstasis, and New South. He is the founder of the online reading series In the Fire Garden that hosts virtual readings and interviews with emerging and established writers. He can be contacted through his website at ShaneBrant.com, Twitter: @terriblebinth, or Instagram: @shanelemagne.

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