Category: Poetry (Page 44 of 52)

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Joy of Chewing Gum

15 August 2022 / Editor

Poetry by Adnan Onart

Her name rhymed with inch;
“joy” in my mother tongue, Turkish:
Sevinç, o Sevinç!
Dark skin, black hair,
and I was told,
eyes blue-green.
All the boys in the neighborhood
between 11 and 15
were after her:
starting fights in front of her house,
sending poems to her,
bribing her baby brother
with his favorite
pistachio ice cream.
No avail:
Never smiling, always serious,
she carried an adult anger
around her as a shield.

What chance had this skinny boy
with good grades in math and sciences?
None, you would think.
This is how I learned
that kittenish life
is full of opportunities,
we don’t dare to grab:
on the day of our move,
she called me out of the truck
and gave me five tiny sticks
of chewing gum
without saying anything.

Adnan Onart lives in Cambridge, MA. His work has appeared in Prairie Schooner, Colere Magazine, Red Wheel Barrow and The Massachusetts Review. His first poetry collection, The Passport You Asked For, was published by The Aeolos Press. He was one of the winners of 2011 Nazim Hikmet Poetry Competition.

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Trucker Coffee

12 August 2022 / Editor

Poetry by Mark Jackley

the word ‘one’
contains an O
same shape as
a little black pill
I am talking
trucker coffee
talking Omaha
to Council Bluffs
no commas please this is
basic math
I mean
one highway and
one exit
one darkness
and one me

Mark Jackley is a poet living in northwestern Virginia. His poems have appeared in Fifth Wednesday, Talking River, Cagibi, Sugar House Review, and other journals.

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Luck

6 August 2022 / Editor

Poetry by Fredric Koeppel

I’m pretending that finding an owl’s feather
brings good fortune. When I dip the pointed end
into the inkwell of the moon’s dark side,
I’ll write the shrieks of fieldmice and the dumb
terror of the velvet-gloved mole. As for me,
I’m sewing the feather to one of my shoulder-
blades, so, like the village idiot, I’ll half-stumble,
half-fly through the rest of my life, looking
for another feather until my luck runs out.

Fredric Koeppel is a writer and editor living in Memphis. He has had stories, poems and novel excerpts published in a variety of print and online journals. He and his wife, who has a real job, rescue and foster dogs, maintaining a pack of nine.

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A Victorious Tilting

4 August 2022 / Editor

Poetry by Sharon Whitehill

Laughter involves a “victorious tilting of uncontrol against control.”
Mary Douglas

You were there in my dream
for the first time last night,
its power derived from my laughter
at something so comic
I couldn’t find breath to explain it to you,
though you waited, expectant.
Twice I attempted to speak,
twice grew so tickled all over again
I couldn’t move air to make words.
You stood close, leaning in but bemused
as I tried, and failed, to get through.

What remains of the dream is the bliss
of those spasms of mirth:
how they left me as helpless, in my delight,
as a Laughing Buddha.

What remains with me still
is that visceral tickle
that left me still smiling when I awoke.
As if to pay tribute to laughter itself.

Sharon Whitehill is a retired English professor from West Michigan now living in Port Charlotte, Florida. In addition to poems published in various literary magazines, her publications include two biographies, two memoirs, two poetry chapbooks, and a full collection of poems.

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Between My Toes

28 July 2022 / Editor

Poetry by Ann Ingalls

I walked along a sandy shore
And watched a curling wave.
It rolled right up between my toes,
And this is what it gave…

A small pink shell that curled up tight,
Was right in front of me.
I closed my eyes and then I heard
The whispers of the sea.

Ann Ingalls is a children’s writer with over sixty books in print or forthcoming. She writes both fiction and nonfiction, picture books, leveled readers, and teaches classes for the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators, The Writing Barn, local libraries, and universities in Kansas City area where she lives (http://anningalls.com).

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Two Poems from Ouagadougou

26 July 2022 / Editor

Poetry by Suzanne Ondrus

The Exhaust Pipe’s Kiss

Out of her black skin,
a three-inch by three-inch
pink square
rises
from her right calf.
The square’s white
puckered
periphery frames
this event
that happened a year ago.

An Un-moveable Feat

Parked,
stretched out
from head to feet,
reclining over this stagnant metal beast,
with hands folded
over chest,
head
between handlebars
and feet hanging off the seat,
the driver sleeps

Author Note: Ouagadougou is the capital of Burkina Faso located in West Africa. The city is known as the premier motorcycle city in West Africa because motorcycles are the major means of transportation. In fact, Burkina Faso is called “the African capital of two wheels.” These poems were based largely on my time living in Ouaga from 2018 to 2020.

Suzanne Ondrus‘ first book, Passion Seeds, won the 2013 Vernice Quebodeaux Prize. She was a 2018-2019 Fulbright Scholar to Burkina Faso. Her new poetry book Death of an Unvirtuous Woman is available from Finishing Line Press. Hear her read on her YouTube channel Suzanne Ondrus and find updates on suzanneondrus.com.

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Places I Have Unexpectedly Found Tears

22 July 2022 / Editor

Poetry by Samantha Ashe

a spin class,
the final song
that one collective push
the recognition of each other
in this synchronized struggle

a Macy’s,
after overhearing an adult woman
refer to her mother as “Mama”
the softness of its sound
the summoning of sweetness
the remembering of my own

in traffic,
interstate 5 heading north
the woman by herself
a passionate steering wheel drum solo
head swaying
screaming the words
witnessing a spirit
unleashed

the bathroom,
in the middle of the night
the fifth ungodly night of no sleep
palms cradling my face
pleading to the sleep gods

in my daughter’s room,
watching as she tucks
each of her babies in for bed
the gentle timbre in her voice
the tactile tenderness of her hands
the hope
that maybe
she learned this from me

Samantha Ashe lives in the Pacific Northwest with her husband and daughter where she works as a personal trainer and fitness instructor. She spends her free time writing next to an open window or in the woods, chasing summits and sunrises.

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Elegy to Winter

20 July 2022 / Editor

Poetry by Pete Zenz

I love you snow,
But for a while
You’ll have to go,
No more compile
And make way for
A time of glee
Your absence shores
The florist prix

The snowman melts
And leaves his soul
And scarf of felt
And eyes of coal
Upon the ground
And dissipates
Without a sound
He ‘vaporates

The jutting veins
Of naked trees
Free from your chains,
Now budding leaves
Where once your hoar
Gathered like moss
They bear no more
Your cold emboss

The scent of spring
Is in the air
The birds will sing
And flutter there
But you’ll return
My frosty friend
Take your adjourn
‘Til summer’s end

Pete Zenz began writing five years ago after 35 years in food service. He has two self-published poetry volumes and a third manuscript finished; he has written a children’s story and a cookbook. Currently, he is working on a volume of children’s poems and a collection of holiday-based flash fiction.

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House Hunting

17 July 2022 / Editor

Poetry by Lana Hechtman Ayers

We’re looking for something spacious
as the interior of a poem,
so roomy you can get lost in its images,
hallways that roam along
to unexpected turns of phrase.

We’re hoping to find something close
to all the conveniences—
fresh air perfumed with meter,
trees that tousle their limbs
seductively in breezes,
hills curvaceous as villanelles.

We’re searching for a place that fits
our personalities—a kitchen of clean
steam and courtesy, delectable soups
and sestinas bubbling on the stove,
a bath where unsullied truth
freely flows from all the taps,
a bedroom that masters
the art of moon phases and meteors.

We’re seeking a home we can fill with
blankets, dog fur, cat fur, the enjambment
of too many books.
A home that will hold steady looks,
silly askance glances,
even a few cross words once in a while.

A home that weathers moods well,
the way streams wear every broken rock
down to pebble shine.

We don’t mind winding avenues
of rhyme, and have no preference
about windows, so long as they’re
always wide and wise.

We don’t care for one-way stairs,
though being able to stare at a view
of empathy is essential.

We want a home in which light
is as bright as the scent of lavender,
a home where the sound of rain
on the roof is our hearts’ sonnet
as our arms reach for one another
in the night.

And we want a home where the silence,
however rare, is always and ever holy.

Lana Hechtman Ayers, MFA, has shepherded over eighty poetry volumes into print in her role as managing editor for three small presses. Her work appears in print and online in places such as Rattle, Snake Nation Review, and Verse Daily, as well as in her nine collections.

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Fable of Love on Fire

15 July 2022 / Editor

Poetry by Alexander Etheridge

In another season, another world—
that lost moment, we ran into nights
of shudder and crucible, autumn

and oceans—our love
barely risen out of its roots.
We stepped breathlessly

into a century of summers.
We watched eternal changes
of the magic aster flower

and the magic aspen tree
in the temple of dawns, open on all sides
to white spangled light—

Just before black asteroids
crowded our sun. The temple columns
cracked under ice, and thorny vines

choked the roads.
As the trees crawled out
to drown themselves in the tide,

we began our dying
in the black burning plains,
our few seconds of love gone

into a child’s book of fables.

Alexander Etheridge has been developing his poems and translations since 1998. His poems have been featured in Wilderness House Literary Review, Cerasus Journal, The Cafe Review, The Madrigal, Abridged Magazine, Susurrus Magazine, The Journal, and others. He was the winner of the Struck Match Poetry Prize in 1999.