Poetry

Christina J. Baptista

The Women

Cleopatra had the asp—and I had the absinthe
to turn my body into a shield, a carapace that could separate the pieces
to stop this feeling, to staunch this flow. You looked on, said nothing,

watched sunlight start as a small capillary bursting
in white light as the morning slipped between the blinds. Did you know
the jackfruit was named by a sixteenth-century Portuguese naturalist whose sister was burned

at the stake for being a secret Jew? When we think the past is dry, it is moist with pumping blood.
While I seek an exit, a way to bury secrets, everywhere, ancestors leave their touch.
I am afraid to think what can creep by when I’m not looking, what can slither in—what

can sashay into a room and pretend to be me. At night, the water glows pale
as absinthe. A scream of a siren breaks the spell. I look away, embarrassed, your plumbing hand
fishing plastic from the lake, as if you could get drunk by touching anything but me.

Christina J. Baptista

On The Spiral Road

I like a man
who eats. More than that,
I like watching him eat
and them eat, in general.

In a Rock Hudson movie
there’s this scene
where it’s raining, and he’s alone,
and turned to the side,
profiled, sitting slightly bent
at a makeshift table
in a primitive shack,
scraping, upon his fork,
what looks like some kind of fluffed rice
intermingling with bits of this and that
(it could be doctored sand, or sawdust,
made to look like fine cuisine on screen).

The plate is grey, grisly,
like the scene. The sound is as somber
as the rest of the setting. Unremarkable.
Then comes a knock on the door,
and the change in his posture
and the way he holds his fork,
as if deciding whether to finish
or to stand and answer, that resonation

of thought
that reaches even the tips of his hair
(unusually coifed for this place)
is just so wonderfully momentous—
as if he’s just forgotten what he’s done,
that he is just a mechanism continuing energy;
as if he’s forgotten
what he’s eaten,
and that man even needs to eat at all.

Cristina J. Baptista is a first-generation Portuguese-American educator, writer, and author of The Drowning Book (Finishing Line Press, 2017). Her work also appears in The Cortland Review, CURA, 3Elements Literary Review, and elsewhere. Cristina has a Ph.D. in English and teaches American Literature courses in Connecticut. Find her at https://www.cristinajbaptista.com/.

J.T. Leonard

Hebrews 13:2

Tired and mud-fallen, the imprints of celestial bodies.
If you walked through a field of sprawled corpses,
the wingless flesh, the faces bloated blue—would you
know angels from refugees? Could you tell the difference
between a melted halo and a pile of gold teeth?
Name a horror so defined, that you’ve packed
a suitcase to evade. Name a child you’ve left behind.

There’s nothing here on but slaughter and low production,
news stories at seven that you’ll take as a pill, cages
scrolling through the metal of our bones. Soon enough,
you’ll see it all as static—silhouettes kneeling at the wall,
silent pixels flowing from heads like mercury, rumors
of blood at the border. What will complacency taste like?
Cold Bible pages— Sand covered ice—Formaldehyde.

J.T. Leonard

Seasons

1.

Something fluttered in the dawning;
traces of stars, the splintered bones
of what could have been a planet.

The rising sun reminded you of a flock
of x-rays piercing through a dying fire.
Your entire life floated out with the tide.

Nothing outsmarts gravity, your father once said.
It was late October, 4 am, on a pebble beach in Maine.

2.

I’m standing on a green carpet, waiting out the day
like I’ve waited out most of my days, overwhelmed
by a stillness which continues to stalk me.

It traces my footsteps when I sneak to the woodshed
for a smoke. I hear it in the next aisle over while I’m
grocery shopping; loudly drumming its fingers
to the insectal buzz of fluorescent lighting, waiting
impatiently while I choose my offbrand of frozen peas.

It huffs, face half hidden behind a trashy magazine,
while I stand in the checkout line at Kroger.
It jogs beside my car in the rain, always keeping pace.

3.

There is a chemical so rare that it can only be found
tucked somewhere in the shadows of my bedroom
on winter afternoons— days when I should be working.
I can only feel it if I reach out blindly, and only for
a moment before it morphs into a cobweb or a pale
yellow lampshade or a pile of dirty laundry, left for weeks.

Meanwhile, we buy small packets of tomato seeds
and plan to start a garden, sometime next spring.

4.

Only half of the storm made it to the harbor.

Your mother picked you up by your childhood
and spun you into an ornament, sweet and fragile

like glass sugar.

In the rain, the best of your forgiveness melted away.

More specifically,
when they found your car, the windshield
was drenched in your brother’s cheapest whiskey.

They say the air smelled like melting plastic.
It tasted like gravel and summertime
and all those lemon-lime beach towns
you swore you never loved…

John T. Leonard is an award-winning writer, English teacher, and poetry editor for Twyckenham Notes. He holds an M.A. in English from Indiana University. His previous works have appeared in Poetry Quarterly, december, Chiron Review, North Dakota Review, Roanoke Review, Punt Volat, Rappahannock Review, Levee Magazine, Mud Season Review, The Blue Mountain Review, Genre: Urban Arts, Stonecoast Review, and Trailer Park Quarterly. His work is forthcoming in The Showbear Family Circus, High Shelf Press, and The Oakland Review. He lives in Elkhart, Indiana with his wife, three cats, and two dogs. You can follow him on Twitter at @jotyleon and @TwyckenhamNotes.

Mariah Ghant

On Having a Son

Part 1

I will raise my boy to smile
no matter how wide the gap between
his front teeth may grow.

I will show him the trick
to opening a jar and making it look
simply effortless.

He will not fear
biking downhill at extreme speeds
or stepping onto the escalator
or crossing over a bridge
that sways like a slow serpent.

I will teach him
to groove even though
I can barely turn my own partner;
to pitch clear across the dirt patch
stretching far beside our house;
to cook with extra garlic powder
because my mother says that is the only way.

He will never be ashamed
of his talents, his slang,
his great-grandfather’s broad shoulders
peeking in through the shape of his suit jacket.

One day, he will cradle my own fears,
a grown man catching his mother’s
salty tears, mopping them off my chin.

And he will pass along even these
minuscule breaks in time to his own.

Part 2

Let me carry him in the universe of my womb,
untraversed and unexplored
but for him.

I am no Mary,
but I would trudge from here to Jerusalem
if only to hear him coo one sweet time.

I will place him in a basket and shoot
downriver— me trailing closely behind—
towards some perceived oasis of shelter.

There will be no simple commandments
from an angel with a trumpet
to instruct me on raising him.

Then, when it is time for him to father his own,
see me reach deep within my belly,
pull forth many a constellation,

weave together these onyx galaxies,
and place them at his feet—
a map of stars for our lineage to follow.

Part 3

Lord, give me a son
even if I dread
being a mother
to a little
black boy.

I will swaddle him
in news clippings
headlining “black sons dragged”–
dead or alive—
“from their homes.”

And when the gospel is not enough
to mend his sides back together,
I will assure him
that he has always
deserved more.

Mariah Ghant (she/her) is a black, female artist based out of Philly. An alumnus of Vassar College, she studied Drama and English focusing specifically on Acting and Poetry Writing. Mariah enjoys creating and teaching art across various genres including theatre, writing, dance, and movement. Forever fantasizing on the phenomenal, Mariah’s writing explores relationships, identity, the cosmos, and attempts to explain the unexplainable. To see more of her work, you can visit her poetry Instagram @mariah.g.poetry.

Belle Minelli

i run screaming across the highway

naked as the sun.
dodging minivans semis
little blue sedans with
poodle decal families.
expecting windshield bug splat.
fat blood drops swinging off side-mirrors
& hood bone ornaments.
onto concrete divide &
peel myself open.
with all the dramatic reveal of a villain
removing her mask.
shaking loose spiders & flies
raw ribcage unhinged.
as chugging brakes screech & tires
leave black kissmarks on pale hov.
apertures gasp in disgust
interest a die roll of honks.
until my gore dries leathery
& my knees ache.
my flesh and skin ebb in the wind
traffic flowing
downstream.
waiting to be exalted
or rescued.
but the commotion only lasts
as long as i am first seen.

Belle Minelli lives in a town of middling size and works for Corporate America. Her writing career spans back to slam poems in talent shows, garage sale posters, and chucks. She’s inspired by the incredible art developing in the world now, and wants to be a productive part of the conversation. She loves her dogs and the sun.

Sigfried Jerusalem

Trousers Down Cathedral

- Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.

About nulling heaven and matin bells
About the bishop tolling ruined choristers

About broken chapel windows, bloomed out,
over coarse linen under the tabernacle
altar thrown down the spacious gutters

About the wet breath that still comes heavily
drowning as the gazing promised
in waking dreams with hands on shoulders

that help is like childhood in the ravenous roar
that insists corruption is the body
thin as earth, on display, in summer

that is affection stalled in the throat
About rage’s cull to rock before a window,
your worship, in grief, in brick, broken

The six non-binary writers work in their one person: June Summer Jones, Siegfried Jerusalem, John G. Carmody, Marina Stepanova, Ron Romanowski, Ruth Rachel Cyprian form the New Festival Theory crew. They have published two books: The Big Book of Canadian Poetry (Augustine Hand Press, 2011) and Incantations from the Republic of Fire (2013), and continue to work on poetry in the rich ground of one of North America’s most diverse cultures, Winnipeg, Canada. Recently: Marina Stepanova will be published in the international Selkie Resiliency Anthology and Ron Romanowski in Solum, both expected this Fall.

R.H. Alexander

Last Letter Home, November 29, 1917

Sister, what do you think of war now?
Such a silly question. When my mind is
alone I hear “war” and wonder when
we’ll leave, until I feel like leaving.
Then I am thankful I am not in France.

Three of the boys here have fathers who died.
This is worse than war, when news from home
is some of your folks are sick and liable to die.
I would like to be home but don’t, being death
and sickness get most of the furloughs.

This is not grand adventure. The parade’s over.
We are confetti swirling after the empty street.
Some boys say we will be gone three months.
If I get home I will tell you about it close up.
Could we have Thanksgiving then. Love, Paul

Keith Hagen writes under the pen name R.H. Alexander, lives in the Twin Cities area and is retired after a thirty-five year career as a newspaper editor and manufacturer’s representative. He is married to Pamela Hill Nettleton, has seven grandchildren and claims to learn more about truth from them than anywhere and anyone else in these strange days. Hagen has been writing poetry since he was 6 and his work has been published online and in print by Train River Publishing, The Eve Poetry Group and Witches ‘N Pink. You can find more of his poems on Instagram at #R.H._Alexander.

Christine Jones

I AM SO GLAD YOU ARE HERE Spell the Felt Letters on Burlap Hanging from a Dowel on our Bathroom Wall

So you’ll see it says my mother when
I object, embarrassed
by the handcrafted letters. Afraid
they'd curl, then fall
chartreuse & yellow, onto my thighs, slip
through the chubby crack,
bring attention to the weirdness
of blood & sponge.
I remember probing
with the cardboard tube,
trying to find the opening;
a teenager exposed,
sweating over a porcelain bowl.

Later,
at a roadside bar in Rishikesh, I must aim for a hole
dug in the dirt behind a low,
crumbling wall teeming with flies & trash
while remote men lean
against the sultry brick.
Not every girl has a clean facility.

Not every girl knows her mother.
Mine now forgets. Eats a slice of toast
most days. Tells me she likes
everything that goes with tea.

I’m glad. I am so glad.

I appreciate the blood,
its birth & breath & my mother
holding my face repeating.

Christine Jones lives, writes, and swims along the shores of Cape Cod, MA. She earned her MFA from Lesley University and she is the founder/editor-in-chief of Poems2go, a public poetry project, and associate editor of Lily Poetry Review. Her poems have appeared in numerous literary journals including 32 poems, cagibi, Sugar House Review, Mom Egg Review, Salamander, and elsewhere. Her debut book of poetry is Girl Without a Shirt (Finishing Line Press, 2020). cjonespoems.org

George Perrault

crops

a body’s burning in the weeds
along the gravel road

another unknown woman
as if you had to ask.

dental tracing and DNA,
naming takes its time.

this plague year’s a lamentation,
a confession:

we knew it all along,
but the tides, this slippery log:

let’s wail together now
till it yields a kind of joy.

George Perreault’s latest book, Bodark County, is a collection of poems in the voices of characters living on the Llano Estacado in West Texas. He can be contacted at www.georgeperreault.com.

C.W. Emerson

The Joy of Wild Things

is not lost on me completely,
despite the fact that I hew closely
to what is found within four walls.

There are portals into the ferocious,
the unkempt — intemperate climes

where the cold raises blisters
on frozen skin you can’t even feel,

or a heat rash covers
your whole eastern seaboard.

The most austere among us
choose a difficult route
into the wild —

only then do they feel
they’ve earned the sting
of something foreign scraping the rib,

or ayahuasca
like a fever through the bloodstream,
leaving it clean, luminous again.

The joy of the wild
lies there on the line between
cortex and limbic,
connection and synapse —

resides in the juncture of She-who-is-Creator
and what, by her nature, She leaves behind:

a means of transmission, a tarnished cord,

the disavowal of anything or anyone
that stands between or separates us

one from the other, the other from the One.

C.W. Emerson

It Pains Me to Say It

For Heidi Seaborn & Clare Chu

And so, I have not yet thanked you
for the generous cache of books (including a copy of your new book,
big congrats, by the way!) that appeared in my mailbox just after you left.

To be totally transparent, I should say
that I’m not sure exactly when you left, what with
finalizing my divorce and all those last few days. Actually,

since we’re in a truth-telling mode,
I should tell you that I went to Puerto Vallarta that week
without a word to anyone, took a condo a block from the beach

and hibernated, escaped from the world
completely. Well, truth be told, not completely,
since that was the week I met Javier, whom you’ll meet very soon!

So let me say, in all honesty, when I found
the books you sent, I hadn’t checked the mail in several weeks,
no, several months, not since I received that nasty 3-Day Notice to Quit,

which, quite frankly, freaked me out completely.
I mean, one all-night party, the bed collapses, and suddenly
I’m a bad tenant! — but lucky me, I’m in the apartment you leased last year…

my dear, I hate to ask it, it pains me to say it,
but a cable bill came, addressed to me. Can I count on you to pay it,
what with my divorce and all, and your book published, and you in the chips?

You are a dear. I can’t say it enough.

C.W. Emerson’s work has appeared in journals including Crab Orchard Review, Greensboro Review, december, New Ohio Review, The New Guard, and The American Journal of Poetry, and has earned awards and honors from the Atlanta Review, The Comstock Review, New Millennium Writing Awards, New Letters Press, and others. Emerson is the winner of Poetry International’s 2018 C.P. Cavafy Poetry Prize and a 2020 Pushcart Prize nominee. His chapbook, “Off Coldwater Canyon,” is forthcoming in January, 2021 from Portland-based press, The Poetry Box. In 2021, Eyewear Publishing, LTD will publish his first full-length collection of poetry, “Luminous Body, Glittering Ash.” Dr. Emerson lives in southern California and works as a clinical psychologist.

Richard Stimac

Arabia

One thousand miles upriver from Algiers,
Five hundred more from Memphis and Cairo
Where barges forge the brownish Ohio
Through locks and dams and rusted winding gears,
Then past where the Missouri disappears
Into the Mississippi undertow,
They found Arabia in an ox-bow
Dry bed of fallow farmer’s fields. For years,
I paid to see the wreck, the China plates,
Tinned meats, the guns to stanch the flow of blood
From Kansas, cylinders that cymbal crashed
Like sunlight across sand, and unabashed,
I saw self-reflections, as if the Fates
Chose me as ground upon which they would flood.

Richard Stimac is influenced by 20th-century poets who used traditional forms to explore contemporary life. He is also influenced by the local St. Louis landscape of water and stone, dominating metaphors in his poetry for movement and rest and the relationship of time to both. He lives in Maplewood, Missouri, with his cat, Mr. Leo, short for Leonidas, king of the Spartans at Thermopylae. Richard has published poetry in Sou’wester and Michigan Quarterly Review and a scholarly article on Willa Cather in The Midwest Quarterly.

C. Henry Smith

Nature/Nurture/Neither

i.
Some towns shape like the people inside them,
but some can only steam and crack against a forgotten cast—as they are just that,
cast, like the paper mill’s steel drum, the goatherd’s letter C brand. When I think of home,
I think of what I couldn’t build with my sister’s hands,
my brother’s tools, my father’s hasty instruction; I think of what chance
I’d have to fall in love in a place that knows my first and most failings;
I think of the difference between a second act and a long con, a fresh fire
and one built on the husks of a thousand struck matches.

ii.
One morning, we each leave for the woods, to find our shining archetype,
the incipient quest, a supernatural hand, and proof
we’ve outgrown sylvan dread. Whether eaten by wolves
or grown into the life of a noble woodcutter, we forsake what wouldn’t contain us:
the hamlet, the homestead, the bomb hatch, the womb.
Forsook for not holding tight enough,
or for not allowing us to stay.

iii.
A wood likes time and magic. When Iago says we work by wit and not by witchcraft,
we think, well why not both? We think wilderness will resemble garden
or our thumbs will be strong enough to establish a thumbhold. Dumb luck
or a simple thaumatology. Either way, we’re always chasing Eden.
Always far away. And if you ask us what it looks like,

the best we can say is green.

iv.
Yes, these are the woods of whichI’ve heard such stories, woods that make me worry
I’m fresh out of wrong turns. Burrows and bough thick with beam curtained hills,
where everything is living, living, every inch is alive. Dreadlocks
and sailors’ knots and whirlpools of flora, green of one hundred and eighty
saturations and shades, one
for every angle against the sun.

v.
Before the whispered incantation; before the silent fall
of a tree; before you lick up my bone dust, ripple the blood pool
with your maw, say what you’d call me if natural law was more forgiving,
desire run widdershins, your mouth made for softer things.

vi.
See not in your teeth marks the red spring and marrow, the ministry of lost children
further into the dark; see in them the arc of our mountain:
our subalpine spur and our pass—in our pass is a crag, in the crag is a crook,
in the crook is a creek, in the creek is a cove, in the cove is a cave, in the cave is a tree.
A once-protected tree. A home-meaning tree. An old knowing. The start of something.
The site where we will thrive or die trying to unmyth a living.

vii.
Some people shape like the towns inside of them.
Home teaches what we don’t know we need until we’re knee deep in the needing,
teaches duplicity, the way to a man’s tastes. Home is the exhale,
we the resonation, chance will articulate and time direct the sound. Its faults,
our foundation, its even faintest contempt, our only food source.
At home as in timber we find our best horror.
Home is a hellsmouth, but it’s the only one we’ve got.

C. Henry Smith

Poem with Lines from Britannica Online

i.
Then I was a snag.
A fallen tree,
a common juniper.
My sprawling decay,
squatting in rocky terrain,
and memory shaped
as many ornamental cultivars.

In a colder state
my friend is passing away.
Is passing, will pass, will have
passed. The future,
so passé, he says, ready
for the finish, the big
high-dive plunge:
always one for transformation,
Ovid-minded and open
to becoming a seedling once more.

ii.
Then I was a sapling.
My juvenile leaves,
needlelike. One day
they’d mature, awl-shaped,
spreading and arranged
in pairs or whorls of three.

Why I grew remains a mystery.
My trunk’s compulsion led places
I neither then nor now long to be. Yet
here we stand, abloom.
Heart cracked open wide enough
for a skulk of wild foxes
to come live inside.

iii.
Then I was a sprout.
An invader of glades,
pastures, prairies,
other parts of the open range.

I start one day
to write for my future children.
What I’ll sing at their beds
when at last they’re asleep.
I see my mother
in a grandmotherly shade,
sending knit gifts at the holidays,
baking this once with real sugar.

iv.
Then I was soil.
Porous medium,
principal substrata of life,
damp reservoir of water
and the most vital nutrients.

I find myself holding
a three-gallon garden pot.
Gently coddling its heft.

Coddle and coo. Press
clay to my breast.
I sing my incipience.
A time when I wanted
only warm milk and touch.
How nice it would be
to unsimplify an existence.
Complicate a life
with the most vital things.

C. Henry Smith makes poems in Oregon. His work has appeared in Jabberwock Review, River River, Gravitas, DMQ Review, Peach Velvet Mag, Ode to the City, and others. He is a co-founder of The Calamity, a former resident at Chicago Art Department, and an MFA Poetry student at Oregon State University. He can be found @chenrysmith.