Karen J. Weyant: Epiphany with Dead Carp

Two weeks before the tourist season starts,

the lake is suddenly crowded with dead carp.

A virus, experts say, as thousands of fish float

through the waves. Bloated bodies cling

to the banks, eyes bulge, slip from their sockets,

a thin film of pus and skin coats the surface.

Fins and gills and lily pads lap the shores,

turn shallow waters into graveyards.

Every morning the neighbor’s daughter,

a thin stick of a girl everyone said wasn’t quite right,

wades in, pushes pennies into the mouths

of the carp, thrusts them towards the undertow.

To pay the boatman, she says to anyone

who will listen. For weeks, I look for something

willing to ferry the dead. Sometimes I see

a blue heron looking lost in the thick water.

More often I spot river rats, eyes twitching, wise.

[Previously published in Lake Effect, 2010]

Karen J. Weyant's poems have been published in Crab Orchard Review, Harpur Palate, New Plains Review, Poetry East, Rattle and River Styx.  The author of two poetry chapbooks, her first full-length collection, Avoiding the Rapture, was published by Riot in Your Throat Press last year. She lives, reads, and writes in northern Pennsylvania.

Mike McCormick: Depression

Lantern sputters

in a hollow hole

Eggless shells

groan and crack

The hungry fox

climbs the stair

Eyes shining

in the failing light

Micháel McCormick writes poetry in his Batman pyjamas. Mike's award winning work has appeared in over eighty journals and anthologies. Connect with Mike at @mikemccormickauthor on Facebook or his website www.mikemccormick.org.

 

James Sanders: continue as guest

 

James Sanders is a member of the Atlanta Poets Group, a writing and performing collective. He was included in the 2016 BAX: Best American Experimental Writing anthology. His most recent book, Self-Portrait in Plants, was published in 2015. The University of New Orleans Press also recently published the group’s An Atlanta Poets Group Anthology: The Lattice Inside. http://somejamessanders.com

Shannon Frost Greenstein: I Really Miss the Hillary Step

It used to be that the Hillary Step was a Leviathan,

a Mecca,

something about which to dream;

a vertical face of solid rock –

juxtaposed against an altitude no human has ever been intended to inhabit – 

the Hillary Step was the most welcome sight

in all of the Death Zone.

It used to be a rite of passage.

It used to be that it would take two months of asceticism and misery

while occupying the least hospitable climate on Earth –

all of it endured to stand atop the ceiling of the planet

for the 120 seconds it takes fingers to start to freeze –

to successfully ascend Mount Everest;

the Hillary Step was the ultimate challenge

before the pure and inimitable rapture

of reaching the summit.

It used to be a reward. 

It used to be that conquering the Hillary Step

was synonymous with auspice; was synonymous with expertise.

The most renowned boots in all of mountaineering

each grappled with this ordeal of limestone and ice – 

the final obstacle before successfully having climbed

as high as anyone can possibly climb –

named after the first to stand upon the virgin snow

at the very top of the world.

It used to be that laymen stayed on the ground.

It used to be that scaling all 8849 metres –

that’s 29,032 feet for you Americans – 

required the most technical of skill;

only the truly elite could even fathom

ever having the privilege

to challenge life and death

upon the heights of the Himalayan range.

It used to be that there wasn’t a billionaire class.

It used to be that mountains in Nepal were pristine,

untouched,

unsullied by humanity,

like a moment lost and frozen in time;

71 years and 50,000 climbers later,

pollution and waste decorate the slopes of Mount Everest

while the glaciers shrink slowly away.

It used to be that the planet wasn’t melting.

It used to be that the native Sherpa

wouldn’t dare disrespect the mountain they called Chomolungma –

the “Mother Goddess of the World,”

a sacred playground for the Tibetan Gods –

by polluting her flanks with our painfully human foibles

just to get to the top.

It used to be nothing but poverty in Kathmandu, before Everest became a business. 

But things change,

and tectonic plates shift,

and crowds multiply,

and climates warm;

and what was once an accomplishment

is now simply a transaction

irrevocably disfiguring the sacred path to a summit

which the Buddhists warned us not to climb in the first place.

So now that it’s gone –

a victim of chaos theory

and our inevitable descent into entropy,

a relic to never again be joyfully vanquished

by future generations of high-altitude mountaineers –

I cannot help but mourn what once was,

because I really miss the Hillary Step.

Shannon Frost Greenstein (She/They) is the author of “The Wendigo of Wall Street,” a novella forthcoming with Emerge Literary Journal. A former Ph.D. candidate in Philosophy, her work has appeared in McSweeney's Internet Tendency, Pithead Chapel, and elsewhere. Follow her at shannonfrostgreenstein.com or on Twitter at @ShannonFrostGre. Insta: @zarathustra_speaks

Joan McNerney: Computer Game

I just click the awesome icon.

to discover words or match jewels.

Tiles slow...a beaming box of eye candy

to pick and nibble as my score  grows.

All the petty slogs and limps of 

this withered day are beaten back.

I love my snazzy game name and avatar.

My world sits inside this small square.

I am winning.

Joan McNerney’s poetry is published worldwide in over thirty-five countries in numerous literary magazines. Four Best of the Net nominations have been awarded to her. The Muse in Miniature, Love Poems for Michael, and At Work are available on Amazon.com. A new title Light & Shadows has recently been released.

Andrea Maxine Recto: The Corners of Your Love

They say everyone has edges,

points where tolerances end.

But not you.

Until the day you died,

you were an open field

I wandered endlessly.

Your absence is a labyrinth;

I’m crying at all the dead ends, 

wishing I’d find you in the corners instead. 

Andrea Maxine Recto is a Spanish-Filipino poet living in Manila. Her work has appeared in One Art: a journal of poetry, the Santa Clara Review, and the Red Eft Review, with more forthcoming in Rust & Moth, the Long River Review, and elsewhere.  

Roisín Browne: Ballerina

after Anastasiia Kerdina

Evacuation apartment

shattered mothers shout

windows mocked in dust

a little girl takes her first finger

draws ballerinas on forlorn glass

makes them dance on light

Roisín Browne’s work has appeared in Black Nore Review, Poetry NI, Live Encounters, The Stony Thursday Book, Ragaire Literary Magazine and Mnemotope. She was commended in the Gregory O’Donoghue International Poetry Prize 2018, shortlisted in the 2019 Bangor Literary festival and highly commended in the Seán Dunne Inaugural Poetry Award 2024.

Miriam O'Neal: Lindens

There were linden trees in Kyiv

like the linden tree beside my driveway

where honey bees brizzz through June,

ignoring every other bloom for that luscious drip.

Once, in Padua, the lindens almost broke me

their fragrance dense and sweet as heartbreak

through the open doors—my last lover a thousand

miles away and Padua’s heat daring me to breathe.

Are there still linden trees in Kyiv?

Unable to flee, have they pushed deeper—-searching

out their siblings’ tendrilled roots in the soil of parks and graveyards?

Does their perfume re-saturate the air each time the smoke clears?

Basket bark, wood lathed into cabinets, creamy blossoms dried and steeped

to break the fever—they give and give. I read that lindens sometimes live a thousand years,

their broad limbs sprawled across the sky, their only predator the war-

makers who bomb every   living   thing.        As if that means they win.

Miriam O’Neal’s newest collection is The Half-Said Things  (Nixes Mate, 2022). She is Poet Laureate of Plymouth, MA. She has published in The Waxed Lemon, North Dakota Quarterly, and elsewhere. New work will appear in Lily Poetry Review soon. She hosts the longest running reading series south of Boston.

Peter Adair: Mr Casey

sways over me in the doorway. Come in, little man, come in, 

he says, and tousles my hair.  The sun licks his stubbly face,

music slithers from a room.  When I hold out the letter – 

dropped through the wrong box – his sweaty hand grabs it,

he stumbles on the doorstep, his face glows like a red sky,

darkens as he rips up the letter and flicks away that bloody bill

and stoops and looks at me and wants to be my friend.

His quick breaths stink.  We both are still. 

Then I run down the steps and run down the empty street,

and still I am running away and still I am running away.

Peter Adair's poems have appeared in Poetry Ireland Review, The Honest Ulsterman, New Isles Press and many other journals.  An e-pamphlet, Calling Card, is available from Amazon.  He is the recipient of a NI Arts Council bursary for 2024.

Brian Beatty: What You Don’t Know

The coin-operated horse

out front of K-mart

had no idea

merry-go-rounds existed.

Or traveling carnivals, 

for that matter.

Brian Beatty is the author of five poetry collections and a spoken word album. Beatty’s poems and stories have appeared in Appalachian Journal, Cowboy Jamboree, CutBank, Dark Mountain, Evergreen Review, Floyd County Moonshine, Gulf Coast, McSweeney’s, The Missouri Review, The Moth, The Quarterly, Rattle, Seventeen and The Southern Review.

Michael Kellichner: Funeral for a Magpie

Magpie with flies crawling on your eyes,

motionless on the curb near where my daughter

plays, your uncharacteristic silence and stillness

captures her attention, her endless energy

stalled. Sadly, you are not her first brush

against death—a year past the family dog

going ahead without us, reduced to stones

resting in a glass sepulchre. It isn’t much,

but I break a branch, move you beneath a bush,

bury you with a blanket of leaves. No more

hopping through the weeds, no more

morning caws at commuters passing below,

the speed is drained from your sleek blue feathers,

the immaculateness of white remains. We all

deserve privacy in decay. There comes

a time when there’s no more help to give,

or there was nothing to be done at all.

And what are we, then, I want to say,

if not the ones left to provide

dignity for the dead? But there is no time;

my daughter is off already, calling for me

to follow, unburdened in the way only children

can achieve, or perhaps simply satisfied

we have already done all we can.

Michael Kellichner is a poet and writer originally from Pennsylvania, but has been calling South Korea his home for quite a while. Previous poems of his have appeared in various online journals, including Loud Coffee Press, the Tahoma Literary Review, and The Tishman Review, among others.

Donna Best: Ratbag Visitors and Misanthropes

First, a reminder to those who chew glass.

In polite company, one doesn’t mention

the dead who visit; the nebulous possessives.

Still a small part of me wonders why

they inhabit a region of my mind at all

as if a discomfort imprinted

by the cane of the chair I sit on or

grit in the memory of an oyster.

An oyster does not choose the grit

but it gets under the skin and later

the flaw made, becomes a shiny pearl.

Are the nebulous a kind of grit

sunning itself in a gravel pit, waiting

to be a flaw? I put this for you

against your wonders.

I am never alone. Sometimes memories

happen because I let them. I light the grass

for the heat of the burn.

The once-lived could traverse and visit a

valley I’ve never been, not on the road to me.

They should fledge new wings

and mingle with insects, merge with

their miniature minds in company with

each other and monster me no more.

Can anyone guess or imagine why they

cling and devil me? Start with year after

year of their whispers. Start with that grit.

Donna Best has published in anthologies, newspapers and journals in USA, UK, Philippines and Australia and broadcast on radio stations, awarded ‘Firsts’ for her poetry by an arts festival and a state-wide ekphrasis challenge in Australia as well as The Ekphrastic Review.

 

Jeffrey Hanson: Moon Talk

Themes about the moon

have tricked people into blood feuds,

gotten people to sucking at late hours,

kept people up, created legends of howling

people affected by the moon and

shot in the dark by a terrified farmer.

In various parts of the country, all affected

by the moon, affected by its evil light,

people have pursed lips and wondered:

When will it stop its steady stare?

When it goes away, it reappears,

unremittingly.

About the moon grandfathers say:

The moon is a thief, a fiery block-stone

whip-scarred bloom.

It curses with hope the unlucky.

Old men.

Unmoved haters of night.

For those emptied the moon is a pock,

a silver sore, a scab of powder & ash.

The moon turns a blonde blue,

and the moon sends a young man

to the cliffs on his twenty-eighth year.

Grandmothers soothe on moony nights.

To the children they say: It can’t not hurt you no ways.

Blue moon is like the sea, blue like a hot bright sky,

chrome when you swing highest,

and just when you nearly loop over, that joy,

children, is moon blue. Real and not real,

the moon must be silver, as honest as a coin.

Jeffrey Hanson received a PhD in English and Creative Writing from Ohio University He has recently retired from teaching after 26 years. He now lives in Bellingham, Washington with his wife Marilyn where he spends his days writing and painting. 

Tammy Smith: Only the Most Massive Stars Become Black Holes at the End of Their Lives

But what does that matter to a perimenopausal single mother having a hot flash, battered by the blush of her blues? She tries not to sweat shivering through her shirt. Worries about her weight, struggling to manage the synergy of dark energy punctuating the flow of less heavy periods. Single moms can’t afford to spend such spotty days complaining. Their kids need them to be supermoons, wearing silvery capes. Blind to bravery’s vision, few realise the fullness of grit or fathom how a black hole is just another name for a heavenly body collapsing under the pull of its own gravity. As real as any other kind of star, but harder to explain. A double dose of pointy sharp shadows slanting perspectives, skewing our view. I know it seems bizarre to categorise parenting without a partner as anything but the collapse of space and time, but relatively speaking, a single mom is a competitive force of nature. A turbulent tempest twisting humanity’s head in divergent directions, wasting resources. An erratic seismic shift in the ways we stretch metaphors, using the science of climate change to bend language like straws. 

Irregular periods-

become fickle symptoms

of cyclical problems

Tammy Smith, a social worker and a single mother from New Jersey, draws inspiration from her work in mental health. Her writing has been published in Grand Little Things, the Dewdrop, Ariel Chart, The Esthetic Apostle, Ailment: Chronicles of Illness Narratives, and in io Literary Journal. 

David Annwn: Chiron’s Cosmology

for Charles Simic

It’s not too difficult

being a human and a horse -

being neither one thing

nor the other or both

simultaneously

for a few millennia;

Or being a comet

or asteroid mistaken

for a moon, sitting in

a coma or your dirty trail

of dust, deciding whether

to be ice or water.

It’s like lying on one’s back

trying to read the tear

in the ceiling

or learning the soft shoe shuffle

with one wrist handcuffed

to a doorknob

in a deserted building

in a district scheduled

for demolition;

Or being the ‘Great

‘Who-Was-He’ in a 

school for escape

artists that never had enough

students to convene;

Or noticing the trees

were all uncannily badly painted

or having the theatrical backdrop

of a flickering galaxy

suddenly whipped away

from you as you are

still frantically

trying to remember your lines.

(Note: Chiron: in mythology - the wisest of centaurs. In astronomy, a hybrid comet named after the centaur.)

David Annwn’s fourteenth book of poetry is Wonder-rig , a collaboration with Lee Duggan and Nigel Bird published by KFS last year. David has worked extensively with calligrapher, Thomas Ingmire. Their work can be found throughout the InterNet.

Helen Harrison: River Teeth

Half a century in

batting against a sticky wicket

of memories that refuse to be washed away

they rest in the middle of the Irish sea

onboard a ferry

a lounge deck smelling of whiskey & ginger ale

flirting laughter, brown upholstery

receiving waxy apples 

from kern’s lunch boxes

collected in a faux leather shopping bag

worn at the handles

cracked with white webbing

and had brighter days

you, the centre of male attention

twirl & run, run & twirl

towards soldiers who fuss

making sheep eyes at your mother

on the way to Ireland

bag toppling with apples

you lift one to your mouth

crunch around bruises

careful to leave browned peel

alone, like mini-islands on flesh

clearing passageways 

for when you are much older

middle-aged

navigating torrents 

of what feels like forbidden fruit.

Helen Harrison is a poet, based in the Northwest of England, she has been published with The North, Bare Fiction, Ink, Sweat & Tears, The Interpreter’s House, Cake, Flash, Prole Books, Home from Home, Axon, Cerasus, Shorts Magazine and has held Artist-in-Residence with Lime Arts, and Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust. 

Sunday Review: Jenny Cleland - In and Out of Love Poems

In order to write a love poem, one must have experienced love, naturally; but one also must love language. A love poem is not just an evocation of desire, kinship or sensuality, it is also a celebration of how we use words to bring expression and witness to that love.

And so, we find within In And Out Of Love Poems, Cleland’s debut full-length collection, writing that is rich not only with the carousal of love, but also in how that love is expressed. A stroke of the face becomes “gentle journeys over the bones”.  A glimpse of a stranger, mistaken for someone once close, is morphed into “[y]our name reverberated / through that cavernous heart”. The idea of alcoholic spirits that do not mix becomes “Your tongue and your heart / still burn with the taste / of me”. We find passion, but not raw, frenzied passion; rather, it has been filtered through considered articulation, leaving it more accessible, more provocative of empathy to the reader.

In searching for love, and exploring the fulfilment one requires in love, it is interesting to note what Cleland rejects. in ‘Star Storm’ we see the realisation of an unrequited love: “I wished / for happiness, just happiness, // not you, not so specific as you”. The poetry revels in the clash of the grandiose, abstract idea of love against the concrete reality of the beloved, the other person who sometimes pales in comparison to the concept of love. In ‘Face It’, we find the bold proclamation “You fall in love with places, not faces”, suggesting that love – true, significant love – develops from what you live through together, beyond initial physicality. And if you experience a place with someone who isn’t equal to your passion, both the place and the person becomes vapid and insipid.

I am bored of empty places,

grey places, tired of trying

to understand what you are

and are not. I am red hot.

Cleland clearly knows that the road to love is not always a smooth path, and the triumph of the collection is this fresh contrast of pure love poems alongside more cautious or regretful tales. ‘The Window and the Bird’ uses the metaphor of a fledgling smacking into a kitchen window mid-flight, shaken up but still able to fly away after. The idea of perfecting flight is manipulated and repurposed: “There was no learning curve / … I was out of my tree, / crashing again toward / the illusion of love.” Elsewhere, we get the twin images of the packed suitcase and an open door that one can’t bring oneself to walk through in a poem (‘Clashing Symbols’) that is unabashedly meta in its use of symbolism, its brazenness enforcing the brutality of the message.

Scattered through, Cleland gives us a few micro-poems, each one highly effective in their brevity and succinctness. Some serves as notes to oneself, a pep talk in self-love; others are striking damnations towards those who have come before and betrayed love. A key theme throughout the collection is this need, after unsuccessful romances and dangerous, false roads, for self-love. There is a beautiful simplicity in ‘Falling Snow’ when the speaker states:

My life has been beautiful since you left.

My heart has been repainted.

It is a new blank canvas

The economy of language serves to echo the new-found freedom: suddenly life is clearly, simpler than before. In other poems, we find Cleland questioning herself and others, but here, when she states, “I know who I am now”, it feels like a glorious revelation, one that the reader can’t help but cheer for. The story comes full circle in ‘Conquering Fear’, a keystone poem in the collection, that marks a moment in falling back in love, after a catalogue of hurt. Although not the last poem in the book, it fulfils the book’s story, and leaves one feeling oddly fulfilled and yet desirous within their own love:

I have become an open door

that had not been walked through before

and I wanted more and more and more

of you.

In total, this is a carefully considered series of poems that work incredibly well together. There is perhaps a bit more emphasis on the ‘out of love’ that the ‘in love’, but victory without adversity rings hollow, and Cleland gives us an account that shows both defeat and resurrection in poems that any reader will easily identify with. 

In and Out of Love Poems: Passionate Verses of Desire and Heartbreak: Exploring Romantic and Sexual Love is available to order via Amazon.

Jenny Cleland: Flame

Driving country roads, 

killing moths like hailstones. 

Place names like the kisses 

time pushed to the corners 

of lips; the places

it still hurts when it hits.

[from the forthcoming collection In and Out of Love Poems]

Jenny Cleland has had poetry published by Juju, FourXFour, Time In, Freckle Magazine and Rancid Idols. Her first chapbook “Belonging to Myself” was published by Pen Points Press in 2016, the same year that she won the Belfast Book Festival Poetry Slam.

Barry Peters: Four A.M. at the Jackson County Rest Area

I recline the seat, run the engine for heat.

A light orchestra plays Up Jumped Spring

… I wake from a dreamless sleep,

remember it’s December. Two degrees.

Just me and the big rigs ringing the lot,

a dozen growling Cerberi. Steam rises

from their pipes like breath. I imagine

the drivers in their cabs napping

on berths, the warm biers of fairy tales.

Three hours later, I arrive at a country hospital

covered with snow. Ask for the room number,

wait at the threshold. My father, shivering

beneath wafers of useless sheets. My father,

gasping like a cold truck that won’t turn over.

Barry Peters lives in Durham, North Carolina. Publications include Best New Poets, Grist, Image, RHINO, and The Southern Review.