Poetry

Jose Hernandez Diaz

La Paleta

A man in a Rage Against the Machine shirt went to the market to buy a Michoacána popsicle. It was his favorite popsicle. The flavor he got was fresa or strawberry. He purchased the popsicle and then went to his job interview. He was applying to be a professor. He’d never had a Mexican-American or Latinx teacher growing up in K-12, but he had some inspirational professors in college. During the interview, the man in a Rage Against the Machine shirt was asked about his shirt: “why are you wearing a Rage Against the Machine shirt to an interview?” “Rage got me into poetry,” the man said. If it weren’t for Rage and a few influential teachers, I never would’ve pursued literature.” “Very nice,” said the interviewer. The next week, the man received an email. He would be teaching “The Writing of Contemporary Poetry” at his local community college. On the first day of class, he picked a Michoacána popsicle as a starting point for a writing assignment. The students wrote poems and stories.

Jose Hernandez Diaz

La Libertad

A man in a Chicano Batman shirt went to a park in Northeast LA to play soccer or fúbol with some friends. He used to play in high school, too, but he quit to focus on political science and debate. He recently graduated from USC with a Master’s in Public Policy. His goal, no pun intended, is to work for a professional soccer team one day: LAFC.

            The man in a Chicano Batman shirt arrives at the park and begins to warm up with his friends. They are all first-gen or second-gen Latinx folks from the neighborhood. When the game starts, the man in a Chicano Batman shirt scores two goals, one with his head, and the other from the penalty area. His team celebrates by jumping up and down and chanting in a circle. After the game, they meet up at their local brewery. They have local brews and pizza. The man in a Chicano Batman shirt has an horchata ale. It’s called “La Libertad.” At the end of the night, the man in a Chicano Batman shirt drives home beneath the moonlight, listening to Gary Clark Jr.

Jose Hernandez Diaz is a 2017 NEA Poetry Fellow. He is the author of The Fire Eater (Texas Review Press, 2020). His work appears in APR, BLVD, Georgia Review, Iowa Review, Poetry, and in The Best American Nonrequired Reading. Currently, he is an editor for Frontier and Palette Poetry.

Nancy Hightower

Holy Ghosts

By ten p.m. the city
is draped with tired men.
One wraps his arm
around the subway landing
like a lover, legs eaten
by a dark stairwell,
as if he might take root there
and later bloom with crocus
and cold snap.

Another rests his head
on the curb, arms crossed
over chest while his body
sinks in limbo between
two parked cars, ready

to be spirited away, and the last,
barely breathing, stretched atop
an overturned magazine stand
like Michelangelo’s Pietà.

The city is wet and lonely,
wanting resurrection.
A man bellows
from his pup tent
on 5th Avenue:
Do you remember
when we were beautiful?

Nancy Hightower has had poetry, fiction, and essays published in NBC News Think, Longleaf Review, Entropy, Sundog Lit, Barren Magazine, and Drunk Monkeys, among others. Her first collection of poetry, The Acolyte, was published in 2015 by Port Yonder Press and was a finalist for the Elgin Award Book of the Year. Her story 'Medusa Gets a Girlfriend' was chosen for Wigleaf's Top 50 in 2017. In 2018, she was granted a micro-residency at the Strand Bookstore by The Poetry Society of New York as part of their joint Poet-A-Day Project. She currently teaches college in New York City. She can be reached on Twitter @NancyHightower and Instagram @nancyehightower.

Alison Lubar

Through the Fence

My dog runs away for fun:
her fox-narrow frame slips
between iron pickets
[under cautionary chicken wire]
to test my love for her.
I'm lucky
this morning he isn't easily angered
when I wake him in a panic
(like two years ago
when I tried to catch a falling bread knife,
dropped mid-washing, and sliced my thumb
and index finger, could have filled the sink
with blood and he, half asleep, bandaged me,
stopped the crying, too, as he used to do).

We find her across the street, under a hydrangea.

I too want proof of love
and the only immutable measure
is how my name is called,
transmuted to an animal wail--
at what decibel of desperation
does sound become subhuman?

I listen/run this summer--
fly with the guise of writing,
to palliate a poet’s loneliness with verse
and fill his impending nullity with words,
see if he will follow, protest this exit--
and find myself in a six hour drive
to a city hotel. He never calls.

The serrated blade lets love escape,
cuts wider than the spacing between posts.
He wants me to howl his name, but I know instead
I'm the one who will slip through the fence. Now I know
that you can’t flee one part -- you have to leave it all.

Alison Lubar (she/they) teaches high school English by day and yoga by night. They are a queer femme of color whose life work (aside from wordsmithing) has evolved into bringing mindfulness practices, and sometimes even poetry, to young people. Most recently, their work has been published by or appeared in Rowan University’s Glassworks, Giovanni’s Room anthology queerbook, Fearsome Critters' Quaranzine, Apiary Magazine, and antonym. Find them on Twitter and Instagram @theoriginalison.

Ilene Rudman

At the Women’s Imaging Center

Remember that powder blue Jaguar
its top down under a cobalt sky and
the skinny boy/man with cornflower
eyes at the wheel. 

Think navy like the pea
coat you wore in 10th grade to hide
your emerging breasts. Don’t dwell
on the crush of cold metal
about to come. Drag, 

drag yourself back– as you lift
your right arm, then your left over
your head. Remember that summer
you swam in the bathtub-warm
turquoise sea and picnicked
on a sugar-fine beach. Pray, 

pray sky blue, an everything’s-
gonna’-be-okay shade as you
calculate your risk—like your
sister’s,  your mother’s and
grandmother’s, like your aunt’s
and your niece. And pull

pull the blue gown more tightly
around and pretend what’s coming
is no big deal. Just keep your head down
like the other woman pretending to
read the New Yorker.

Ilene Rudman is a counselor in private practice just outside Boston. Often her poetry as well as her work grapples with fear of real and anticipatory loss. As a poet, sometimes all she can do is kneel in prayer. Other times, humor seems the best antidote. Her poetry has appeared in the Comstock Review, CALYX, A Journal of Art and Literature by Women, Crab Creek Review, Apeiron Review, An Anthology of New England Writers, and others. Her manuscript, Staying The Night, was selected as a finalist in the 2019 Comstock Review’s Jessie Bryce Niles Chapbook Contest and will be published by Finishing Line Press in 2021. She can be contacted at irudman@aol.com.

Alexandria C. Eisenberg

On the table today

A glass bottle of Gabapentin.          A plastic of powdered laxative.               A jar of Indica.   

A checklist entitled: “After Death Occurs” which I jot into my journal.

Copies of Steppenwolfe                            The Disappearing Spoon

and The Wit and Wisdom of Oscar Wilde

with a tiny red notebook on top

inside which is a list of books by Wendell Berry

that I recommended last week

all three crossed out now

with a single           diagonal             diagnosis.

The candelabra

with years of wax still clinging

pink

from the year you’d ordered a thousand candles

in the wrong color.

Two pairs of reading glasses and a pen.

7 yellow pills scattered

almost invisible across a yellow cloth.

A filled-out form entitled

“Request for Medication

to End My Life

In a Humane

and Dignified Manner”

which I have signed as witness

and your son too

[who I also love                                   and will also lose].

Several sticks of incense          sticking up in all directions           from an old bowl of ash.

A casket of toothpicks.

A folded towel for bloated-arm comfort.

That black battery-powered clock

that doesn’t tick but also doesn’t

stop time.

A pile of pictures

the kind you’d tear from last year’s calendar

to decorate the walls of the outhouse

(another meditation on time and passing)

these ones featuring the Nazca Lines

which they say will last forever

but I wished similar things

of your footprints in yesterday’s snow.

There’s more:

mouse poop              miscellany

memory                          dirt.

And underneath it all

three reed-woven place mats

– one for each of us –

and the red velvet one

at the center

unraveling.

Alex C. Eisenberg is a child of the Pacific Northwest with ancestry from Central and Eastern Europe. A gardener, grief worker, and rite-of-passage guide, Alex's has many muses that infuse and imbue her writing, the most important of which is mystery. These days she finds herself writing, rooting, growing, and grieving on a small homestead on the Olympic Peninsula with her partner, their five cats, and an ever-changing number of chickens. For more of her work visit alexandriaceisenberg.wordpress.com/.

Elisabeth Harrahy

Please to Be Prey

hey you
with that
hungry look
in your eye
sharp canines
smooth pelt
come claw
at the meat
on the back
of my leg
from your barstool
feel me out
with foreplay
then dance with me
southpaw
to the blues

drag me
by my nape
to the grass
drenched in dew
pull my hair
down my back
arch my spine
so i breathe raindrops
and drown
in vodka
in you
bare my throat
for the maul
skin me raw
to the bone
with your lips tongue
and teeth
pounce on me rough
beneath
a violet sky

i tell you
this is how
i want to die

Elisabeth Harrahy’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Zone 3, Plainsongs, Ghost City Review, 3rd Wednesday Review, Bramble, Gyroscope Review, Drunk Monkeys, Mobius: The Journal of Social Change, The Café Review, and elsewhere. Her work has been nominated for Best of the Net. She is an Associate Professor of Biology at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. She may be reached at eharrahy@gmail.com.

Paige Elizabeth Wajda

Minutiae

You want it to be a perfect cup of coffee. A well-rationed cocktail.
Yoga flow, hygge mornings. Coo-coo of well-meaning doves.
Well-timed bloom of backyard rose. Orange juice, bacon, cheerios.
The virgin spine of a bestselling book. Refining your eyeliner swoosh.
Peering at paintings in a museum portal. Acquainting yourself with Bach.
Repairing that long-dead relationship with your dad. Crafting perfect planters
for the plants you won’t kill this time. Breathing revelation from the wind.

What it really is: that tweak in your back you can’t wring out.
A ten dollar handle of whiskey mixed with Diet Dr. Pepper (you call it
Diet Dr. Nail Polish Remover, pat yourself on the back). The neighbor’s dogs
yowl all day, the crows chased away all the precious doves. You sit outside and
holy shit that fly is gigantic, how is it so hot at fucking eleven. You’re a three-course meal
for mosquitoes. At least we don’t have to deal with snow, but then NPR reminds you
about the mega-drought. Your husband steals the last cup of coffee.

So many jars of pasta sauce. So many cans of knockoff La Croix.
You could spend your time reorganizing your notebooks and photos,
but if the world’s ending, so open a beer instead. Sitting on the patio,
you enjoy each breath, all the way down to the bottom of your deep,
degenerate lungs, filling the spaces where your wings would be.

Paige Elizabeth Wajda is from California and a member of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma. She spent four years teaching English in Poland before earning a Master’s in Creative Writing from the University of Edinburgh. Her work has recently appeared in The London Reader, Red Planet Magazine, and Impossible Archetype. If a career in writing doesn't work out, she would like to be a cult leader. Find her online at paigeelizabethwords.wordpress.com or on Instagram @rampaigewajda.

John Van Kirk

A Smooth Stone

                                                for Karen

Marsh Fork is not the place to look for smooth
stones—the sandstone shelves & breaks off in
layers, sharp-edged. But I wanted to bring
you back a stone whose smoothness would
speak to you, say something about your
skin where it is taut across your hips or
follows the contours of your lower back. I wanted
to bring you back a stone that would say
something about your easy laughter, your relaxed
companionability, a stone you could roll
between your thumb & fingers, finding no
imperfection. I pictured something hard &
flat, an ideal skipping stone, or a stone
to weight a letter set aside to be read
again later. I wanted to bring you the kind
of stone you could easily find on the black
pebbled beach of southern Chios, in Greece,
or in the flats & riffles of the West Branch of
the Delaware River where it flows full of trout
between New York & Pennsylvania. But Marsh
Fork, in Wyoming County, West Virginia, is
not the place to look for smooth stones, & all
the smoothness that I found was when the flat
creekbed turned slick beneath my feet, &
I went down, hard on the edge of one of those jagged
shelves. I yelped & groaned & rose up
limping, trying to walk it off & not fall
again, kneading my hip with the heel of my
hand, foreseeing the veined bruise like Carrera
marble that would butterfly out across my back,
feeling the hard knot forming beneath the skin,
smooth, round & flat, a perfect skipping stone
to bring home to you, to bring me home.

John Van Kirk is the author of the novel Song for Chance (Red Hen Press). His short fiction has won the O. Henry Award and the Iowa Review Fiction Prize and has been published in numerous magazines and several anthologies. Emeritus Professor of English at Marshall University, he lives and writes in Ashland, KY. For more information, see www.johnvankirk.net.

Taylor Adams

Sunday Breakfast

It’s a different kind of loss:
No coffin. 

He pokes at cold eggs
In fragile silence,
Here but not quite present,
Head nodding to questions
We never asked.

We do not know when to mourn.
We do not know how to miss
Someone who never left.

At the table we glance and glance away.

Taylor Adams is a writer and undergraduate student in the B.A. English program at Yale University.