#8.1 A Poem by Sherry Shahan
Loitering
I am four-years-old. Sitting on the edge of the porcelain tub while my mother paints on her cat-eyes.
It is not enough to watch her in the reflection of the tri-fold mirror. I want her to face me, to feel her arms around me, to squeeze me until bedtime. Instead, she sprays her sweeping up- do with Aqua Net.
Eight-years-old. I still wait.
Now I want to tell you about my mother’s rabbit. It died when she was sixteen. But that’s a misnomer since all rabbits tested died. A few days after being injected, the female is sliced open. Ovaries change in response to hormones secreted by a pregnant human.
Twelve-years-old. I have stopped waiting. But I want my mother to tell me the lie that everything will be okay.
I am seventeen. My rabbit dies. My mother’s tears gather on her cheeks.
~
I am thirty-two. My mother and I come together over the evening news and a cocktail, adult conversations, bookended with laughter—returning to the same stories, family history relived, reorganized, rewritten.
In the memory, she smiles at me. This is why the memory sticks.
~
Let me tell you about the first day of spring eight years ago? When sunlight reminds me of children reciting a nursery rhyme.
My mother lounges on the loveseat beneath the living room window. She chose the plaid fabric from Sears, her favorite go-to department store. She is hooked to an oxygen tank, shrunken inside her fake-velvet jogging suit, her cat eyes deep in a trashy paperback, living her last moments like clouds in an ever changing sky.
~
I am in my sixties, standing in the driveway of my mother’s home of sixty-four years. My mother’s beloved lemon tree is lifeless. Her clay pots, cracked, shriveled roots exposed. No bees or butterflies.
Her hushed voice presses the silence. Does any part of us remain here? Does a house begin to settle in on itself when abandoned? Is it the breath of the occupants that hold it up?
But first I want to tell you about my stepfather of forty years. Lost. Lonely. Vulnerable.
The family fears he has become a host to a parasite who has oddly become executor of the estate and co-signer on bank and retirement accounts. The parasite buys a $90,000 Tesla, registered solely in his name.
While hosting this organism my father loses fifty pounds and dies alone on an autumn day when every branch is leafless.
The parasite drives away.
~
I want to tell you about the house, empty, the air stale, unable to exhale. A door slams for no reason.
There are alternatives to what I am doing. They just do not interest me.
The parasite nailed a second curtain rod above the front window and hung a thick red blanket; a veil of dull dust, deception and danger.
I climb onto the loveseat in a crossroad of time, sorrow quivering through my bones, and lift the curtain rod from its bracket. Afternoon light bores through the window in flaxen triangles. I am reminded that this is the only time of year when sun touches the deepest crannies of the living room.
I sit on the brick patio under my mother’s orange tree, planted so she could bag fruit for family and friends. Because this tree is alive with blossoms I stretch my fingers and keep stretching them, knowing healing begins on the uppermost branch.
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Sherry Shahan lives in a laid-back beach town in California where she grows carrot tops in ice cube trays for pesto. Her novel in free verse and traditional poetic forms, PURPLE DAZE: A Far Out Trip, 1965, focuses on a tumultuous year in history. She holds an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts and taught a creative writing course for UCLA Extension for 10 years. .
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#8.2 A Poem by Joseph Kerschbaum
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Joseph Kerschbaum’s most recent publications include Mirror Box (Main St Rag Press, 2020) and Distant Shore of a Split Second (Louisiana Literature Press, 2018). Joseph has been awarded grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Indiana Arts Commission. His work has appeared in journals such as Poetry Distillery, failbetter, Panoply, Flying Island, The Battered Suitcase, Main St. Rag, and The Delinquent. Joseph lives in Bloomington, Indiana with his family.
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Photograph by Alexis Rhone Fancher
#8.3 A Poem by Bill Mohr
Splash Curtains
"Frog b'loop." -- Tim Reynolds
After sorting mushrooms gathered on a long hike, I nap inside my tent, and read another poet in translation;
then squat and meditate. How quietly the dirt I’m awkwardly balanced on smiles at the simplicity of its name.
Air itself exhales. My inhale is illusion. I am being breathed. Air itself inhales. Breath withdraws
into the Silence waiting to hear its name enfolded like the splash curtains of raindrops preening puddles
outside my tent, bouncing back on these syllables like the shorelines of an imperishable overflow.
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Bill Mohr is a professor in the Department of English at California State University, Long Beach. Holdouts: The Los Angeles Poetry Renaissance 1948-1992, was published by the University of Iowa Press in 2011. His critical essays and literary commentary have appeared in journals such as the William Carlos Williams Review, Journal of Beat Studies, Idées d'Amérique, Chicago Review, and the LA Review of Books. His most recent collection of poems, The Headwaters of Nirvana / Los Manantiales del Nirvana, is a bilingual edition published by What Books in Los Angeles in 2018. His poems have also been translated into Croatian, Italian, and Japanese. He blogs at billmohrpoet.com; his website is koankinship.com.
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#8.4 A Poem by Susana H. Case
Smoking
In every cracked old black and white photograph of my father, he’s smoking.
Cigarette, pipe, cigar—
depending on the year. At forty-five, a heart attack and he stops it all.
I begin at 12 with my friend Joyce. We cut school, ride the subway
to Washington Square Park, bum cigarettes. She becomes a two-pack-a-day
smoker. It happens fast. When I go to work, I allow myself one cigarette per lunch break,
focus on towers shaped like lighters going up across the way. Oh irony: Officials worry an aircraft
will crash into them by accident some foggy morning. I proofread digital copies
of investment accounts, sneak peeks at my busty co-worker Pauline, who puffs all day, ash lodged
in her sweater like dirty snowflakes. She worries about me, just the one cigarette and without TV—
offers to take up a collection. It’s not the money, I thank her, it’s that I don't dare to smoke more,
can’t bear to watch the war. There's nothing else to look at. My eyes are already red
from checking balances, and from missing another friend—the one who handed us our first cigarettes,
taught us how to inhale and hold them. The one who went away to fight, but never came back.
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SUSANA H. CASE is the author of seven books of poetry, most recently Dead Shark on the N Train, from Broadstone Books, 2020, which won a Pinnacle Book Award for Best Poetry Book and a NYC Big Book Award Distinguished Favorite. She is also the author of five chapbooks. Her first collection, The Scottish Café, from Slapering Hol Press, was re-released in a dual-language English-Polish version, Kawiarnia Szkocka by Opole University Press. Her poetry is translated into Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese. Case is a Professor and Program Coordinator at the New York Institute of Technology in New York City and can be reached at www.susanahcase.com.
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#8.5 Two Poems by Blessing Omeiza Ojo
I Carry my Mother's Photograph like a Portmanteau
My mother often cupped her hands to trap fireflies
that perched on her sore, the sore life gave her.
Some time ago, she caught me instead of her demons.
No one believed I was going to make it alive
from her fist because she held unto me tighter
than her portmanteau, the house of her treasures,
but death, like the shadow of an image of light,
came unnoticed. You can say this was the origin
of a country walking the street of freedom.
I never wanted to be a bird in a place where
hunting is a sin before my ancestors.
I remember how
I, as a boy, was taken to my first school.
Like a kitten, she carried me in her hands, tenderly.
I held unto her, like anxiety betrothed to an orphan.
Does this poem say how I pleasured the safety candy
in my mother's hand, rasping with my tongue
the sweetness of being my mother's attaché case?
Does it say I am missing a metaphor in my life
and all I am is a poem of jarred imagery?
In her days on earth, if she travelled with anyone,
it'd be me. She'd be only with me, as her haversack;
she wouldn't have to check her luggage for anything missing,
and when her hands grew weary, she'd wear me
on her shoulder and sing me a song whose lyrics carry hope.
But in a mourning tone, it was sung.
After her ghost flew from her body into a tree fallen
by the raging thunder from only God knows where,
grief talked me into its caroche,
but this I was already, to my mother;
because I carry her photograph in my wallet always,
and each time I bring her out, I reciprocate her smile.
***
In a Home that Burns, I Carry Hope
My grief is too heavy a thing to be carried
by me or anyone. There was a caring mother
who asked to flatten her back, so spacious
a room for my grief to nest, and be lullabied.
Her poetry ended this way and she became
a literal saying.
My grief, whose root is a branch of bamboo,
traced to my dream of a perfect home, a dream
found slumbering, gasping for air, pleading
the hands of time be tucked in a sheaf of ice.
It is too heavy a thing to be fisted.
All I'd be left with would be either broken or burnt.
Do me the honour of naming what fire has burnt
in your country.
From the song a bird on the neem tree sung
in the presence of a fire, nothing can be perfect.
This means one way or the other, everything
must be scarred or ashened. What or who is next?
I do not know if I should run out of my shell.
May our home be well enough to be peace infested.
Listen.
This poem is saying there is fire on the hill,
smoke in your mouth,
and your tongue is promiscuous,
and the future is running into the cloud,
a sign your heart is burning into embers.
This poem is saying water can plunge into you
to douse your heart before ash is visible in your anus,
and you become another tender soul morphed
into stone, offish, cold – so cold it could go on a safari
not minding how long this place burns.
Unlike anyone else, a sight of smoke reminds me
of a burnt city or a body somewhere in my home.
This poem is saying I am from the city of ruins –
everything burns here – every thing
yet I carry hope in my heart like a chip
that someday, there will be a night or day bold enough
to accommodate the stars, the moon and the sun, all at once.
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Blessing Omeiza Ojo is a poet from Abuja, Nigeria. He is a creative writing instructor at Jewel Model Secondary School, Abuja, where he has coached winners of numerous prizes. His poem, “Everything Around Us Sings” was selected for publication at the Castello di Duino 2021 International Poetry and Theatre Competition. He was named the Arts Lounge’s Literature Teacher of the Year 2020. He was a shortlist of Eriata Oribhabor Poetry Prize 2020, semi-finalist of Jack Grapes Poetry Prize 2020, multiple shortlist, Wakaso Poetry Prize and the winner, 9th Korea-Nigeria Poetry Prize (Ambassador Special Prize). When he is not writing or reading, you may find him playing PES.
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#8.6 A Poem by Kenton K. Yee
MOLE WITH A MOTTO
Never settle, not even for wholes. Every regret began as complacence. Resist contentment. Keep digging holes.
Only those who dig can discern bull. Confidence is the root of delusion. Never believe you’re whole.
Should you ever achieve a goal don’t go on vacation. Resist satisfaction. Dig more holes.
Only self-control forestalls the lullaby of puissance. Living is digging. Dig yourself whole.
I know you want to grow— achieve eternal sentience. There’s only one way: dig more holes.
Father, I’m working the hoes. Don’t worry, I have no delusions. I never settle or look for wholes. All I do is dig more holes.
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Kenton K. Yee has placed fiction & poetry in The Los Angeles Review, Plume Poetry, PANK, Strange Horizons, and Hobart, among others. He completed the Iowa Summer Poetry Workshop and is a member of the Attic Institute for Literary Arts in Portland. He writes sheltered-in-place in northern California.
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#8.7 A Poem by Carla Sarett
It was a time of miracles
In those years, we were never bored. Not with Houdini's Giant Milk Can, East Indian Needle Trick, Vanishing Elephant! A man buried alive. Scott's Terra Nova trapped in an ice pack for twenty days. We sobbed when Scott's crew died at the Pole. The Great War starved us. The tired Dead rapped at seances, revealed tawdry secrets.
No one slept for years. How could we?
Next, Houdini taught us souls cannot be Resurrected. We'd been fooled by circus Tricksters, so we jailed the Spiritualists. We sat in romantic darkness with Valentino. We blew kisses to Greta Garbo.
We bid farewell to the magician.
In death, Harry cloaked himself in Moon shadow, in the white belly of the whale. He glows, he wraps, he unravels. He teaches his tricks to starfish. But no one finds him now.
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Carla Sarett’s recent poetry appears or is forthcoming in Blue Unicorn, The Remington Review, San Pedro River Review, Sylvia, The Virginia Normal and elsewhere. Her novella, The Looking Glass, will be published in October (Propertius) and A Closet Feminist, a novel, is slated for early 2022 (Unsolicited Press.) Carla lives in San Francisco.
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#8.8 A Poem by Bruce Robinson
Catastrophic
Well, blundered; write to you tonight with a heavy hand:
I had wanted to introduce you to a business which would have benefited us both and earned a good profitable amount if you are also a writer/reader I can trust.
Our company ran out of stock yes decanted itself of this deliquescent rhyme used once and habitually in the production of some animated verse and this rhyme
is only found in your country. Since ever we started making use of this language I am the only one who has the address, the address of this particular local locution
in your country because I am the company pro who that worked with the former boss. Before this present one took over. Are we clear on this? Therefore
I will give you the contact of the local locution in your country so that you can negotiate with them and sell to my Boss at a very high price:
Well, blundered, as mentioned, previously, write to you tonight, heaviest hand.
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Bruce Robinson marvels at the films of Marcel Pagnol, Sacha Guitry, and Akira Kurosawa, the songs of Charles Trenet, Georges Brassens, and Junior Gong, and the gait of whippets as well. He roots for the Brooklyn Dodgers. The last book he read --no matter when you're reading this -- is Yoshiharu Tsuge's The Man Without Talent. You never know where your next meal or poem is coming from.
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#8.9 A Poem by Susan Johnson
Sweet As Wood Smoke
Love so much easier when you’re old,
flirting with the neighbor’s corgi, wanting
to marry this fragrance spiraling out of
greenhouse splendor, sweet as wood smoke
in December, in freezing rain, in a world
alone. Inside the tulips are cranked.
Flower show cancelled but not the flowers.
A choir of spring peepers in the chancel,
a chance encounter with the sun drilling
a perfect circle into the lake. There’s
nothing you wouldn’t fall in love with
today. Fresh grass smell off the high
tension line, train of electron buzz, volley
of voices, canopy of flight. Back home
a pinch of salt, punch of sugar. Plums
sliced directly into cake batter. They look
like lips. They taste like kissing. On
and on it goes. The joy of accruing,
the paratactic elation of and. Knowing it
will break your heart only makes it pull
harder. You lower your guard, thin your skin.
Settle in only to unsettle again. A change
of route just opens the door wider. A vixen
with four kits and you’re a’swoon. Skylight
dreams. You hoot at an owl until it hoots
back. You’re an odd bird, it says, to be
infatuated with claws and pellets full
of tiny bones. Yes I am, you say, yes I am.
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Susan Johnson received her MFA and PhD from the University of Massachusetts Amherst where she teaches writing. Poems of hers have recently appeared in Rhino, San Pedro River Review, Trampoline, Steam Ticket, Front Range, and SLAB. She lives in South Hadley MA and her commentaries can be heard on NEPM.org.
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#8.10 Two Poems by Christine Tierney
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Christine Tierney has an MFA, a BA, a brand spanking new deodorant without aluminum and a new collection of poetry titled, chicken+lowercase=fleur. Her poetry and flash fiction has been nominated for awards, and published in fab places.
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