Author: Editor (Page 18 of 62)

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My Wife Explains How My New Book is One Long Love Poem

9 November 2024 / Editor

Poetry by Steve Cushman

They’re all love poems,
Julie says, holding up my new book,
and I say, I don’t know about that.
What about the sad dog poems?
Love poem, she says,
The broken bones of childhood poems?
Love poem, she says,
The difficult relationship with my father poems?
She bites her lower lip. Definitely love poems.
And the ones about you,
which are sort of true, but also
an idealized version of our life?
Those, she says, are the loveliest of all.

Steve Cushman has published four poetry collections.

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Houston in August

6 November 2024 / Editor

Poetry by Stacie Eirich

There aren’t any birds here
the only wings in the skies
silver steel, we counted 30
in the space of an hour
over our heads, lights flashing
in early evening skies
drone of engines replacing
songs of sparrows.

On the streets, traffic flows
fast and heavy, whooshing
and swooping across lanes
in swift ascent. Dog-walkers abound
with the dawn, joggers rounding
corners, mothers pushing prams
scores of cars and buses lined up
for drop-off, a continuous cycle
of bicycles, scooters, pedestrians
crossing in pre-dawn light.

I turn down the radio and listen
for each next turn, navigating
a maze of one-ways, interchanges
and tollways. Siri leading me
to the next somewhere else
somewhere new, exciting as it is
unfamiliar and frightening.
It isn’t the size that frightens me,
or the humanity—but that cold silver
in the skies, feathers and song replaced
with aluminum alloys.

101 tons of titanium circling above
our homes, our heads, our children
in the blazing sun of a 106-degree
afternoon, humid and buzzing
with dragonflies, our ears adjusting
to the constant drone of engines
through the night, our hearts longing
for the melodies of
the Carolina Wren
the Eastern Bluebird
the American Robin
the Northern Cardinal.

Our memories full
of blue Louisiana skies
painted with wings
of feathers and light
melody and song drifting down
to meet us in greening grass
brassy winds playing a background
breeze of second-line jazz in our
small-town backyard.

Stacie Eirich is a mother, poet & singer who recently moved to Texas. In 2024, her poems have appeared in Kaleidoscope, The Bluebird Word, Synkroniciti, and Elizabeth Royal Patton Poetry Prize Anthology. In 2023, she lived in Memphis while caring for her child through cancer treatments at St. Jude. Find her at www.stacieeirich.com.

Rhubarb Pie Day

4 November 2024 / Editor

Nonfiction by Summer Hammond

The summer I turned ten, Mom made her first rhubarb pie. It happened to be the Fourth of July. And we were Jehovah’s Witnesses.

That evening, Dad propped a ladder against the side of the house. Let’s have an adventure. We climbed onto the roof. Dad, my sister, then me. Mom brought the pie up, nestled in a backpack. We circled around her. She lifted the towel, revealing her masterpiece. Sunset glow, rich ruby juices. Mom, it’s beautiful. Mom, it’s art. She carved the pie into thick, luxurious wedges. We dipped our spoons in, blissful. Sitting together on sun-warmed tiles, cross-legged. A roof-top picnic, sugared crust, and sweet tang of rhubarb. Fireworks bloomed a meadow of sparks over our heads.

We were Jehovah’s Witnesses.

Was it a sin to watch the fireworks?

Even if you happened to be sitting on your roof, eating rhubarb pie?

Was it a sin to watch them, shyly, from beneath your eyelids, from your peripheral, in quick, furtive glances, spoonful after spoonful?

Or was it only a sin to find them beautiful, to want them to go on and on, to see them even with your eyes closed, your lids like dark palettes, the fireworks painting wildflowers across the stars?

We were Jehovah’s Witnesses.

We did not swear our loyalty to any human government. We didn’t vote. We didn’t serve in the military. We didn’t sing or stand for the national anthem. We didn’t say the Pledge of Allegiance.

We did not celebrate the Fourth of July.

We celebrated the pie. We celebrated being happy together.

Every year, from then on, we called the Fourth of July – Rhubarb Pie Day.

In my secret heart, I loved them, and let sin explode.

Summer Hammond grew up in rural Iowa and Missouri, one of Jehovah’s Witnesses. After parting ways with the faith, she went on to achieve a BA in Literature, and earned her MFA from the University of North Carolina-Wilmington. She won the 2023 New Letters Conger Beasley Jr. Award for Nonfiction.

Injury Lessons

1 November 2024 / Editor

Poetry by Nicole Farmer

The words tendinitis & torn meniscus get thrown
around doctors’ offices & at home leaving

me to come to terms with immobility & mandatory
rest, while my body revolts, my mind riots

& old age cackles in my ear all the fears
of dependency – send my mind reeling in doom,

despair, confined to a chair or couch
to slowly atrophy & wither away to obscurity.

Then just this morning the trees spoke to me –
underground roots rough raspy voice saying

hold tight, stand still & breathe in the day
be like us and sway your trunk/torso

do what you can to reach your limbs/arms up
move with the gentle wind.

Oh yes, there will be chair yoga & stationary
bikes in your future, but right now

slow down, stop racing & look around
delight in the early yellow light & the drying leaves.

August is evaporating so enjoy these last days
of simmering summer swelter.

So, I moved my reading chair to the deck & embraced
a long-awaited repose in the shade of the old maple.

Nicole Farmer (she/her) has published Wet Underbelly Wind (Finishing Line Press 2022) and Honest Sonnets (Kelsay Books 2023). Her poems have been published in Wisconsin Review, Suisun Valley Review, Apricity, Wild Roof Journal, Poetry South, Drunk Monkeys, Sad Girls Club, and many other journals. She lives in Asheville, North Carolina.

Photo by Cosmic Timetraveler on Unsplash

Let’s Fly Away

30 October 2024 / Editor

Poetry by Martha Ellen Johnson

“Grammy, let’s fly away.”
We are sitting on the top
step of the second floor
staircase. Down the hall
is her magical kingdom
bedroom. She’s wearing
fairy wings over her street
clothes as usual, a sign of
a theatrical life to bloom
in later years. “I can’t. I
don’t have any wings,” I said.
“Hold my hand. We can fly
together.” And I do. We
fly down the hall soaring
into another realm hovering
far above the ordinary, held
aloft by the imagination
of the most innocent.

Martha Ellen Johnson lives alone in an old Victorian house on a hill on the Oregon coast. Retired social worker. History of social justice activism. Old hippie. MFA. Poems and prose published in various journals and online forums. She writes to process the events of her wild life.

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Laughter

26 October 2024 / Editor

Poetry by Sharon Whitehill

After Gerard Manley Hopkins, “Spring“

Nothing is so marvelous as mirth—
When breath, in spasms, splurges, spouts, and sweeps
Away all chance of words: attempts emerge in leaps
And gasps of sound, their content nothing worth.
More overwhelming still is laughter brought to birth
In formal circumstance; it can’t be quelled; it keeps
On bubbling up and out, like lava from the deeps
Wherein, suppressed, it flares from inner earth.

What human gain to all this greed and glee?
Our babies laugh unbidden, even deaf and blind;
Every era, every population, has its devotees.
Children learn to fake-laugh when they find
It wins them friends. Laughter is contagious as a sneeze:
Both speak our shared humanity, and we respond in kind.

Sharon Whitehill is a retired English professor from West Michigan now living in Port Charlotte, Florida. Her most recent chapbook, This Sad and Tender Time, appeared in December 2023; forthcoming in late 2025 is another entitled Putting the Pieces Together.

Words Will Have to Wait

24 October 2024 / Editor

Poetry by Bonnie Demerjian

In summer poet gardeners are led astray by produce.
There will be no ghazals when peppers are plumping in the greenhouse,
no time for tercets when rhubarb is in season, when rhymes are tangled in pea vine.

Weeds fill the notebook, refusing to be shaped into neat couplets. They spread at will, their roots leaving scant space for pantoum.
Haibuns run amok. They choke potatoes with bland adjectives and limp verbs. They must be trimmed, but first, the lanky willows that overshade the onion bed.

Who could pen a sonnet when gilded squash blossoms swell, outshining every leafy green?
What lofty metaphor can equal looking upward into cherries hanging heavy, juiceful, nearly ready?
And, look behind, because the crows are poised for ripeness, too.

There’s no opportunity for poetry. Beans and beets, carrots and garlic are waiting, and not patiently.
Harvest now and glean from them words for tomorrow.

Bonnie Demerjian writes from her island home in Southeast Alaska in the midst the Tongass National Forest on the land of the Lingit Aaní, a place that continually nourishes her writing. Her work has appeared in Alaska Women Speak, Pure Slush, and Blue Heron Review, among others.

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If I Were a Bird

21 October 2024 / Editor

Poetry by Wesley Sims

I’d be a bluebird,
loved for its song,
its bold blue suit,
its habit of lingering
on limbs long enough
to thrill our mornings.
More than handsome icon,
a creature comfortable
with itself
who knows how to sit
in silence and wait
for the muse to call the song,
confident the music will come.
A bird with the discipline
of a serious writer,
who gets up early
and gets at his task,
living out the wisdom
that the early bird
gets the pick—
of worms, and words.

Wesley Sims has published three chapbooks of poetry: When Night Comes (2013); Taste of Change (2019); and A Pocketful of Little Poems (2020). His work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, and he has had poems nominated for Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize.

The Things I’ve Carried

17 October 2024 / Editor

Nonfiction by Sherri Wright

The earless pottery pig my daughter Jenny made in third grade and another creature with kitten ears, a bunny tail and a slit in the top for coins. A ceramic cat I bought in Dubrovnik on a trip with my kids. A white glass bird my husband brought me from Finland. I have lived in many houses. I have moved many times. I have purged. I have decluttered. These things have always come with me.

I have carried a gold dragonfly pin with blue and green enamel wings and red jewel eyes my first husband gave me when he returned from a job interview and told me we were moving. The second chink in our marriage. The first was the previous year when I was pregnant and he told me he didn’t get a PhD to stay home and care for a baby. In that same jewelry box is a coral shell necklace set with nine-year-old Jenny’s penciled note, “Mom, I bought it with my own $$.” And my grandmother’s gold bracelet which she had before she was married (in about 1912).

From Ithaca to Minneapolis to Washington DC and Rehoboth Beach I’ve moved an antique desk with eight turned ball feet and six drawers that I found in a junk shop in upstate New York. My arms have worn the warm cherry grain dull and the knob on the door is gone. But the white porcelain vase in the shape of a girl’s head remains. It was filled with white daisies when my friends sent it to me fifty-three years ago the day my daughter was born. It’s perfect for pencils, scissors, an antique brass letter opener, and multicolored pens and has marked my writing space wherever I’ve lived.

A blue and purple silk print dress that I wore for my second wedding in my parents’ backyard. After 37 years it still fits and so does the marriage.

My spiderman bathrobe in black velour with a burn out design. My grandson named it when he was into action heroes and wore Superman pajamas as we read together in bed. Now, standing in the morning sunshine I see the burn out has taken over the thinning velour and the sleeves are starting to fray. The boy who used to snuggle next to me in this robe has turned twenty.

I’ve carried grainy black and white portraits of my great-grandparents and a picture of their general store from the late 1800s. Also, the handwritten poems my great-grandmother wrote mourning the loss of two infants during an epidemic. They carried these photographs from New York to Indiana to Illinois to Minnesota before my father was born in 1916. I brought them back to the East Coast when I retired. I see when I pull them from the trunk in my guest room that the chalky portraits are faded. The ink on the poems is faint, the edges of the paper tattered and fragile.

I am eighty-one. The things I’ve carried—the pottery pigs, the wedding dress, the dragonfly pin, the glass birds, the photos and letters—will outlive me. They have no monetary value. But will they carry any sense of me?

Sherri Wright belongs to Rehoboth Beach Writers Guild and Key West Poetry Guild. She lives in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, where she practices yoga and volunteers for a local food rescue. Her work has appeared in The Bluebird Word, Rat’s Ass Review, Delaware Beach Life, Raven’s Perch, and Quartet.

Auction Circus

14 October 2024 / Editor

Poetry by Patricia Hope

Under the Big Top of lights and steel,
gaping doors open at each end, the noise
rivals a cage of monkeys, sentinels to jungle
chaos. The auctioneer chants his numbers
while the spotters yell – YEAH!
Like Simple Simon come to spend his penny
the bidders vie for the wares. One forty-four
gets one, 159 takes two, do I hear five? Who’II
go five fifty? In the back, another ring of action
takes place at the concession stand. A fly crawls

across the only menu, which is tacked to the wall.
One saltshaker is passed around. The hamburgers
drip grease beside crinkle fries steaming hot from
the fryer, banana pudding is served in Styrofoam cups.
Looky here, we’ve got an Elvis knife complete
with autograph, the auctioneer yells and someone
asks if they took it down to Burger King to be signed?
I look around the room. Elvis might enjoy a place
like this, then I remember his whole life was a circus
and I decide he’d opt for more solitude in his old age.

People mill around as cardboard boxes fill up,
and cards printed with bid numbers become fans.
While men stand in the doorway spitting tobacco,
another table of treasure is pulled into place.
The clock ticks, the sun sets, a slight breeze
wafts through the crowd, thinner now, some
succumbing to the drawn-out process. Serious
buyers move closer to the front ready for the REAL
bargains. The Elvis knife sells for seven and a half
in between an angle grinder and a “million-candlepower”

light (I wonder who got the assignment for that striking
job?) I suppress the urge to giggle but no one else
in the room seems to question the light’s power.
After all, the bidding has shifted to walking
canes and umbrellas. Bidders scoff them up,
eager for rain now, some using the purchases
to lean on as they leave, treasures tucked under
arms and in boxes. The building is almost empty.
The tent is finally folded and everyone slips
silently into the moonlit night.

Patricia Hope’s award-winning writing has appeared in the Anthology of Appalachian Writers, Guideposts’ Blessed by His Love, Chicken Soup for the Soul, Agape Review, Spirit Fire Review, Dog Throat Journal, American Diversity, and many newspapers, magazines, and anthologies. She has edited numerous poetry anthologies. She lives in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.