Penny Blackburn: Whenever We Had Chopped Pork Sandwiches for Tea

My sister always asked to eat them

on the back step. As we balanced 

our brown Hornsea plates on our knees,

she would peel apart the home-baked bread,

tweezer out the filling

between disgusted fingers

and throw it into the garden

of the derelict house next door.

Flesh-pink slices sailed through the air

into the undergrowth of nettles 

and docks. Later in the year

small flowers would bloom:

London Pride. Their delicate tint

matched the meaty shades.

I thought they took their colour

from that secret compost. 

A redemption of sorts.

Penny Blackburn's poetry has featured in many journals and anthologies and she was the winner of Poetry Tyne 2023. She runs a spoken word night in Tynemouth and has released her debut collection with Yaffle Press, Gaps Made of Static. 

Maeve O'Sullivan: Leinster Lineage

We know so little about you

dark-haired, dark-eyed Neolithic people,

but, in this bend of the Boyne River,

we see evidence of respect for your dead,

interred in long passage tombs walled by kerbstones

with their carved spirals and geometric lines.

No horses and no wheels then, and yet

you transported snow-white quartz

in crude boats from Wicklow: but how

did you get it from the coast to this valley?

No records exist to tell us this, or how you built

ossuaries which welcome winter light.

As for you, grandad, how did you,

a Shillelagh businessman, pitch up in Finnegan’s

of Navan, a dozen miles west of Newgrange?

A card game, we’re told, with refreshments

served by Frances, the daughter, who caught

your lively eye, then your straight heart.

You’re both entombed now, along with ten

of your twelve children, all graves

marked by inscribed granite or limestone.

I look for signs of you in letters, photos

and the Leinster landscape, so craggy

in the south, so smooth in the north.

Maeve O'Sullivan’s poetry and haikai have been widely published, anthologized, awarded and translated. She has five collections with Alba Publishing, the most recent being Wasp on the Prayer Flag (2021). Maeve leads workshops in haiku, and is a professional member of the Irish Writers’ Centre and the British Haiku Society.

Lesléa Newman: Great Uncle Harry

Every Sunday morning my father chomped on an onion

bagel behind the Business Section of the New York Times,

slurped a cup of tepid Instant Maxwell House

laced with two pink packets of Sweet ‘N Low,

then clinked his cup into his saucer and rose

with a sigh like a man who knew he had a job

to do. “Think I’ll go visit my Uncle Harry,” he said,

as if this bright idea had just popped

into his head. He never wanted company

on those twenty-minute treks from Jericho

to Great Neck, never spoke a word

upon his four o’clock return.

Great Uncle Harry never spoke either.

For thirty years he lay on the living room couch

hands curled like seashells

body a lump of heavy wet sand

big blue ocean eyes staring

at the sky above the ceiling above

his great unmoving head

which he’d cracked open by falling

backwards the day he couldn’t wait

for the elevator and took the stairs instead.

For thirty years every Sunday morning

my father went to visit his mother’s baby

brother, the only person left

on earth who knew him back in Brighton Beach

when he was a pale, skinny boy

sprawled in the sand, digging his way

to China which he truly believed he could reach

just as he truly believed every Sunday morning

this would be the day his Uncle Harry would turn

his head, blink his eyes, and finally cry

out in raspy surprise, “Here he is, my Eddie Spaghetti!”

before sitting up, reaching out and folding him in his arms.

Lesléa Newman has created 85 books for readers of all ages including the dual memoir-in-verse, “I Carry My Mother” and “I Wish My Father,” the novel-in-verse, “October Mourning : A Song for Matthew Shepard,” and the illustrated poetic biography, “Always Matt: A Tribute to Matthew Shepard.” She has received poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Massachusetts Artists Foundation and is a past poet laureate of Northampton, Massachusetts.

Glen Armstrong: Prince Songs at the DVLA

Prince’s unpublished songs

fly about like little birds.

Some of them escape to the future

in time machines

where Prince welcomes them home.

Some of them hide 

from Prince’s estate in the toes

of his stiletto-heeled boots.

It’s spring again, and I must renew

my driver’s license.

One of Prince’s published songs

plays at the DVLA

and everyone goes crazy.

It’s not that an orgy breaks out

amid the clerical grind of who 

owns what and who 

drives whom, but I can tell 

that I’m not the only one 

wondering what it would be like

if it did.

Glen Armstrong (he/him) holds an MFA in English from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and edits a poetry journal called Cruel Garters. His poems have appeared in Conduit, Poetry Northwest, and Another Chicago Magazine.

Frederick Andersen: "Come Watch Me Eat an Entire Rotiserie* Chicken"

(from a photo seen on Facebook)

 

The photos on the posted flyer

show a sturdy-looking man, youngish,

gnawing furiously on a bone, I guess,

incisors tearing the juicy flesh.

Furrowed brow on him, he looks angry.

Serious business this: this next one

will be the fortieth consecutive bird consumed,

and I consider being there,

at noon on the pier near the Walmart

to see him do it.

 

Might prove as therapeutic as the gym.

Uplifting as that Buddhist woman

and her several dozen books.

As significant as church.

At least as meaningful

as the hodgepodge on social media:

Someone’s sombre ruminations on life,

or the nuggets of simple wisdom

meant to buoy me when my seas get rough.

The thousand snapshots of home cooked food,

the welter of uninformed political buncombe.

And all those cats.

 

I’ll introduce myself, congratulate him.

Ask how he affords all those chickens.

And why he does it.

Is he lost, alone,

with a frightened, broken heart?

And would it help to get me through?

Up and out of bed with some purpose,

pinched neck and aching back and all.

The bed where someone used to be

who once did get me through,

who now depends on me.

 

He tells me I know already

why he does it.

He tells me to just start.

Go to the market and buy three birds

to practice on.

Have flyers printed up,

with pictures of me savouring the crispy,

fatty skin and juicy flesh.

“Come Watch Me Eat an Entire

Rotisserie Chicken!” I’ll proclaim,

(spelling “rotisserie” right this time)

hoping to God I won’t need forty

to begin to feel buoyed again,

despite my frightened, broken heart.

Yet suspecting it might take hundreds.

 

*original spelling

Born in Philadelphia in 1949, Frederick Andersen spent some years in the 9-5 world, intermittently acting and writing as well as painting. Now retired, he is married and living in southern New Jersey where he is focusing on several artistic endeavours.

Patricia Gomes: Poeticus Nervosa: The Art of Acquiescence (Coffee Shop Poem #12)

He’s doing it all

right,

this ritual of Poetry Writing.

From my uncomfortably functional wooden chair,

two sugary tables away from his,

I sense his indents, his stanza drops, his fear.

He’s doing it all

right:

the bead of sweat on his upper lip, the concentrated stare

at the line he’s just written,

the white-knuckled clutch on his three-dollar Uniball.

And now we play the Eye Game,

where we cast shoplifter glances

at each other’s flying pens,

our legal pads become blue-lit runways.

Antigua beans roasting

invigorate us; we are exhilarated           and the battle begins.

Nostrils flared, he sweats; I tease.

I’ll show you mine

if you show me yours

but I never show strange men any

more

than the inside of my thighs

and my grandmother’s ruby Rosary beads.

Jungle vines twist around the glass-encased pastries,

bell jars over bat-winged butterflies.

The sound of native drumming is closer now,

the humidity unbearable ….

and when he rises

from his own uncomfortably functional wooden chair,

I set my pen down

to watch

as he puts on his poet-appropriate

faded bomber jacket and stained backpack.

Dropping a twisted white napkin near my feet,

he opens the door quietly and disappears     

into the night, taking the jungle with him, but leaving me

with poem in hand,

victorious.

Poet Laureate of New Bedford, Massachusetts from 2014 to 2021, author and playwright Patricia Gomes is published in numerous literary journals and anthologies. Gomes is the author of four poetry chapbooks. She is Pushcart Prize nominee (2008, 2018 and 2021) as well as a 5-time Rhysling Science Fiction Award nominee.  https://www.facebook.com/patg305/

Lisa Delan: Yom Kippur

I forgive

ask to be 

forgiven 

for fear and 

the corporeal 

ills I wind 

around my 

wrist

red line

between 

the world and

not the world 

between 

blood and dust

and the loss of

everything 

soft in my palm

I cup the 

unutterable

prayer

[first published by Touchstone Literary Magazine, May 2023]

Maggie Mackay: My Aged Parent as a One-Legged Mistle Thrush

A football rattle, machine gun fire

from the iron wrought balustrade.

Fiery fury, chiming clock out of time.

Wonky.

She guards her nesting young,

like I tickle my greyhound’s tummy,

fills her all-weather notes

like opening an accordion full volume,

hops like a high jumper’s last chance.

She can be tempted into your garden

with apples and holly berries.

Maggie Mackay’s poem ‘How to Distil a Guid Scotch Malt’ is in the Poetry Archive’s WordView permanent collection. Her collection ‘The Babel of Human Travel’ (Impspired) was published in 2022. She reviews poetry collections at https://thefridaypoem.com.

 

Dave Wakely: Positives

In all the murkiest places,  

in the frozen soil of a February vegetable bed

or in red-lit darkrooms - whether overseen

by a lax-minded bohemian barkeeper

or a disciplined old-school photographers –

the process is the same.

What seems the most opaque contains

the greatest promise. The inkiest loam,

the unyieldingly clenched tuber or fist,

the grimmest face: there are a million

metaphors for winter

    and for each a catalyst.

A first glimpse of spring to warm

a buried bulb. A twinkle in a yellowed eye

that unzips a stranger’s concealed heart.

A burst of light to cast joyous inversions

across the waiting silvered paper, to make

a forbidding pitch-black mouth blossom

into a white-toothed smile as it swims

into view in a fizzing tray of chemistry.

There is no universal fixative

to sustain these early fruits.

Hope is a spritz of hairspray

in a wind tunnel, but we apply it

just the same. Cross two fingers

that we’ll be ambushed by riches

as we gambol round a thawing lake,

or stub a toe on a treasure chest,

half-buried in the reeds.

Dave Wakely’s writing has been shortlisted for the Manchester Fiction and Bath Short Story awards, and appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. Online Programme Manager for Milton Keynes Literary Festival,  he lives in Buckinghamshire with his husband.

Sarah Mayo: Into the Woods

where the myriad of

branches extend like

neurons transmitting

ideas to trigger the inner

chimera. Leaf after leaf

quivering with promises

etched in each vein of

all those lives you could

still live. The shadows cast

to intensify that warm

apple glow dancing

on your irises, eyes

wide open now

the forest has laid

its caressing fingers

over you.

Sarah Mayo’s poetry appears in ‘Here: A Poetry Journal’, the Cardiff 75 Anthology and will be published by Minerva Rising Press and  Spell Jar Press. Her flash fiction appears in the Wicked Shadow Press anthology ‘Femme Fatale Flashes’. She  edits ‘Valleys Imaginings’, a  literary zine in the South Wales Valleys.

Sara Wallace: Divorced for Twenty Years, What Do I Have Left of You?

A pair of greened copper earrings,

a tarnished silver makeup brush.

Old cassette tapes

with your handwriting

in black pen on the sleeves,

worn soft as felt over time.

A water-rippled cookbook

with a recipe for kugel

on one stained page.

Memories of your body,

your chest hair glossy as a cat’s whiskers.

I gave away the good stuff when we broke up:

the sogata tea pot,

the bora bora salad tongs,

the midnight-blue velvet blanket,

the sheer peach nightgown

your mother gave me for Christmas

the year of your affair.

I don’t even have my wedding ring.

And the baby I miscarried?

I saw her in a dream.

Sara Wallace is the author of The Rival. Her poetry has appeared in such publications as Agni, Hanging Loose, Michigan Quarterly Review, Poetry Daily, Yale Review and others.  As a neurodivergent person with low-frequency hearing loss, she enjoys advocating for people with disabilities however she can. She lives in Queens.

 

Randy Brooks: Seasons of Orange

morning kiss

with a little squeeze

fresh juice

wildfire haze

the glowing sky darkens

our garden

bruised and overripe

sweet enough

for oriole song

sunburnt marigolds

the deadheads dripping

autumn rain

cloves poked into

the dimpled skin

mulled wine

caution triangle

behind an Amish buggy

snowy fields

up to her elbow

in a Christmas stocking

a touch of orange

Randy Brooks is Professor of English Emeritus at Millikin University in Decatur, Illinois, where he teaches courses on haiku and Japanese poetics. He and his wife, Shirley Brooks, are publishers of Brooks Books and co-editors of Mayfly haiku magazine. His most recent books include Walking the Fence: Selected Tanka and The Art of Reading and Writing Haiku: A Reader Response Approach.

Jean O’Brien: Smoke and Mirrors

The magnifying mirror frames her face

holds tight its reflection, throws it back at her

bright and big. The lens takes her in,

rearranges her face. It is insistent;

a moon drowned in a lake.

It has no point of view, no alchemy except a true

reverse of what it sees. Words fly from her.

The lines on her forehead and at her eyes

are granite. Ogham notched on the sharp edge,

she has become her own memorial stone.

She sees the drowned young girl,

sees that terrible fish swimming towards her.

She steps back past the tideline

her face flips over, a rush of vertigo,

a different point of view flicks into place.

Above the silver arched interior

displaced air is too thin. She has passed

the concave mirror’s focal point.

Bell, book and candle cannot hold her.

Suddenly she is Alice, topsy turvy

vanished into a land of smoke and mirrors.

[Previously published in Lovely Legs, Salmon Publishing, 2009]

Jean O'Brien's last collection is Stars Burn Regardless (Salmon Publishing 2022). An award winning poet, she is a Kavanagh Fellow and was recently Poet in Residence in the Irish Cultural Centre in Paris (2021). She tutors in creative writing/poetry in the Irish Writers Centre and at University level.

J. K. Durick: Catch, Caught

It’s not the creature, that monster

that hid under your bed, haunting

the darkness, and it’s not a beast

out of the jungle of your day, some

giant being ready to pounce down

on you when you least expect it.

It’s nothing like that, it’s something

small, something that is in you and

waiting for just the right moment

to catch you unprepared, to start

the process, the journey we all will

take, a journey we all take alone

without some outside fiend or ogre

to blame – it’s just ourselves acting

out the selves we must admit to

and be

.

J. K. Durick is a retired writing teacher and online writing tutor. His recent poems have appeared in Third Wednesday, Black Coffee Review, Literary Yard, Sparks of Calliope, Synchronized Chaos, Madswirl, Journal of Expressive Writing, Lightwood, and Highland Park Poetry.

Barbara Simmons: Mom's Box Grater

After she died, I wanted, more than the cameo brooch she’d pin

to every lapel, her box grater, that precursor, of sorts,

of all food processors, the rectangular metal box that shared

four different ways of slicing up the world. Her deeply veined

hands would set the grater on the kitchen table, waxed paper spread

to catch the shredded, sliced, slivered pieces of whatever foods

had needed whittling down. Carrots disappeared before my eyes,

returning when the grater lifted, curled adornments for a salad,

stewing vegetables for the brisket mother’d boil until it fell apart.

Even with a size that never spoke of domination among the kitchen tools,

the box grater was what I’d been wary of. I’d seen my mother’s

fingers bruised after a bout with it, entering the ring of preparation,

anticipating minor wounds. It was a tool I’d graduate to, fluent

in its metaled Braille, knowing which opening—oval, half-moon, plank—

translated best the food to recipe. My first abraded fingers felt

as if I’d been awarded medals, understanding that my

taming foods was one of many ways Mom was preparing me

for life, fingers raw and chafed that still presented a full hand.

[Originally published in Your Daily Poem, Nov '21]

Barbara Simmons, a Bostonian now in California, Wellesley College alumna, with an MA in The Writing Seminars, Johns Hopkins. A retired educator, she savours language to celebrate, remember, mourn, and understand. Her publications include Hartskill Review, Boston Accent, NewVerse News, Soul-Lit, Writing it Real, and the Journal of Expressive Writing. Website: Barbara Simmons - Poet - Offertories

Tuyet Van Do: senryu

new work place 

a patient asks if I have 

an English name 

Tuyet Van Do lives in Australia. Her work has appeared in Time Haiku, Pure Haiku, cattails, Synchronized Chaos, Scarlet Dragonfly Journal, Cold Moon Journal, Narrow Road, Triya Mag, FreeXpresSion, haikuNetra, haikuniverse, Poetry Super Highway, Take 5ive, The Bamboo Hut, Under The Basho among others. She was nominated for the Touchstone Award for Individual Poems.  

Deborah-Zenha Adams: Use Your Words

“It is an unimaginable tragedy,”

says the woman fluent

in politics, but not

in the tongue

of our nation because

surely every parent

imagines it.

Every teacher,

every child

imagines it

expects it

prepares for it.

“This district has been very good

            in training...on active shooters.”

in classrooms and hallways

every day all over

the country where

unimaginable is our way

of life and death.

Not unimaginable, but inevitable,

nothing we can do because

            “it's too early to talk about policies

            that might need to change as a result of this."

If that seems

untrue, ask yourself

which

            “…uniquely American problem”

I’m writing about here.

[Originally published in Dissident Voice, 2021]

Deborah-Zenha Adams is an award-winning author of novels, short fiction, CNF, and poetry, and served as executive editor of Oconee Spirit Press for ten years. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Roanoke Review, WELL READ Magazine, Dead Mule, Persimmon Tree, and other journals. You're invited to visit her website: www.Deborah-Adams.com

Juanita Rey: Private Orchard

On a hot and steamy afternoon,

my friend Raisa fingers her tight dark curls,

says let’s pick quenepa

and so, in cutoffs and sunglasses,

we meander through Santo Domingo’s alleys

down side streets,

cross the baseball field,

to the old cemetery

where our secret grove

blooms with fruit among the headstones.

We pluck the ovoid green dupes,

prize them open with fingernails and thumbs

suck on the salmon-coloured flesh,

until the juice dripples down our throats,

sometimes sweet, sometimes tart.

We will grow older from here.

We will leave school, find jobs,

meet guys, have relationships,

maybe travel like I have done

or stay behind, in the same neighbourhood,

where Raisa will share a small apartment

not two blocks from her family home.

I’ll shop in food-stores

that don’t stock quenepa.

She’s sure to forget what those tiny fruit

ever tasted like.

No more orchard at the edge of the cemetery.

Our privacy will be ours alone.

Juanita Rey is a Dominican poet who has been in Rhode Island five years. Her work has been published in Mixed Mag, The Mantle and Lion & Lilac.

Lara Dolphin: SCOTUS Van Backs over Mary Richards’ Tam

If you’re a woman of a certain age

maybe you shouldn’t be standing in the middle

of a busy intersection tossing your hat in the air

maybe you should be home raising kids or knitting

maybe you’re at a crossroads in life

and aren’t so much celebrating

as serving things up to the fates

gravity has its way, of course,

and the cap lands on the frozen ground

also, why is the van going in reverse

when it should be going forward

and who is driving that thing anyway

ohhhhh, Justice Aliiiito!

it is almost as if he is aiming

there is nothing to do but muster your dignity

no one is going to commission a bronze statue

of you picking your belongings off the pavement

so you best get on with it and head to the office

wet hat dripping limply from your hand

there is work to be done

and, Girl, this time you’re all alone

[Originally published in Shot Glass Journal, Issue #38, September 2022]

A native of Pennsylvania, Lara Dolphin is an attorney, nurse, wife and mom of four amazing kids. Her chapbooks include In Search Of The Wondrous Whole, Chronicle Of Lost Moments, and At Last A Valley forthcoming from Blue Jade Press.  

Charles Rossiter: It Was Not a Tourist Kind of Blues Bar

The patrons wore farm clothes

and drank cheap beer.

The drummer had only

a snare, bass and high-hat.

The guitar man was a genius.

There were pickled meats

in jars behind the bar.

Pig snouts,

that sort of thing.

Charles Rossiter, NEA Fellowship recipient, has been featured on NPR, at the Chicago Blues Festival and at the Dodge Poetry Festival in NJ. Latest collections are Winter Poems, Lakeside Poems and Green Mountain Meditations all from Foothills Publishing. Publications in periodicals include Bennington Review, Paterson Literary Review, and Thema.

Bridget Gage-Dixon: They Never Told Me

How easy it is to become wicked,

how accustomed we become to disguising it

behind circumstance and clumsy grins.

How we travel endlessly away 

from understanding, but, like the sun,

it splits the horizon with its heat. 

That every great mistake we cannot remedy

might wake the demon we keep 

coiled in our bellies. 

In small towns it winds its way into the whispering 

mouths of women. In the city it seeps into the numbers, 

the tricky mathematics of greed.

Somehow, beauty steals inwards,

its hands knead stony hearts,

makes a luxury of madness.

What is good in us often retreats

to the outermost edges of our lives

but we are porous, our fortresses cannot hold. 

Most of us will do what matters:

Get up in the morning, adapt to narrow spaces,

empathise with monsters, hide our talents,

revel in the calamities of others.

Bridget Gage-Dixon grew up in Old Bridge, New Jersey in a large Irish Catholic family. Her love affair with language began at a very early age when she began to refashion the fairytales her mother read to her. She is still spinning circles with words today.

Keith David Parsons: Allée

Spring blood

rises in dark

bark of dog-

wood trees;

their crooked

fingers flex

at the warmth.

Knuckles crack,

fall off, off,

down to pile-

drive into mud

flash-frosted

with other 

such sticks.

Building grounds-

men rake

them into 

a mockery

of falls,

summers, stunned

by the volume.

Squirrels jump,

shake shattered

copses, scatter

un-hoarding seeds 

of September

with shivers

of March.

Keith David Parsons is a person who came from West Virginia, lives in Washington, DC and is less conflicted about it than you might think. Believes a poem without a message is like a big hole without spikes at the bottom—why would you dig it? Member of DC Poetry Collective; featured in iNK BLOTS Vols. 1, 2.