Category: Poetry (Page 7 of 33)

Photo by Gabriella Clare Marino on Unsplash

For the Love of Color: Ochre

1 May 2024 / Editor

Poetry by Linda Allison

Ochre is a wanderer
Embarking from deep yellow, it charts its way across the palette,
eventually landing somewhere in the vicinity of terracotta.
Ochre is the paprika in my soup and the cinnamon on my toast.
It is a farm-fresh egg, dark yolk dancing in the skillet,
and a hoo-doo rising from the floor of the Palo Duro Canyon.
It is the west Texas sky moments before the sun drops below the horizon.
My memories of Big Bend are all in ochre.

I am a study in ochre. Lids dusted, cheeks rubbed, warm golds and earthy red-browns,
Maybelline Autumn Copper and Almay Sunkissed Bronze
My hair and my sister’s hair, too, different ends of the spectrum: ginger and auburn
both now faded by the years

Isn’t it interesting that what ancient cave art remains was all drawn in ochre?

After forty years in finance, Linda Allison is enjoying a second life as a writer, photographer, and explorer. Her work has appeared in Bright Flash Literary Review, Pile Press, 2023 Utah’s Best Poetry and Prose Anthology, and others. Find her photography in Persimmon Tree and Burningword Literary Journal.

Anapana

1 May 2024 / Editor

Poetry by Tasneem Sadok

Overexposed with explosive imagery
the senses can quickly become dulled
to the granular exhilaration
of a grazed hand
Next time a snowflake falls on your cheek
Pause
And savor the icy pinprick
a crystallized remnant of your planet’s origin
Feel it dissolve
into your breathing pores
already restless
to transform again

Tasneem Sadok is an MD-PhD student at UCLA, fascinated by the brain’s intricacies in contexts of dysfunction. As the American-born daughter of immigrants who fled autocracy, her worldviews have always been steeped in countervailing dualities. Poetry has allowed her to find resolution in mind-numbing tensions while defamiliarizing accepted realities with curiosity.

Photo by Sebastian Coman Photography on Unsplash

Just Kids

1 May 2024 / Editor

Poetry by Susan Zwingli

deep summer bursts the wide garden gate
sweet freedom calls us from whitewashing fences
soon, the jilted brush slouches down the wall, bereft
but we take the hill and its warm, tickling grasses
your emerald eyes tracking the tickling path of a ladybug on my arm
she has her secrets, we have ours
race you, yeah! on the count of three?
running, breathless, our legs pumping pistons
laughing, landing double on your banana-seat bike
a playing card clipped to the tires, poppity-pop-popping
my hands holding onto your hips
we think we’re so grown up, you and I
but late-day thunder booms deep in the sky,
somewhere, far-off, our innocence is running out of time
the changing light chases us, softly laps at our ice cream
mint chip for you, raspberry sherbet for me
blushing my lips pink like the lipstick I’m forbidden to wear
I hope you’ll see
you smile, the freckles on your nose a sweet constellation that I want to kiss
when did you become something more
than just a boy I played with at recess?
I’m all of 11 now, one foot in, one foot racing ahead to some map-less place
but maybe today, we can just be kids, lost in the strange and the wonderful
wandering deep along the river bed, fireflies lighting the sweet-smelling rain
fingers and dreams entangled
while our mothers’ hearts are calling us home

Susan Zwingli is a poet currently living in Boise, Idaho. She writes about love, belonging, and loss, as well as the natural beauty of the Northwest, and exploring mystical spirituality. She holds a BA in English from Michigan State University and a Masters from the Portland Seminary (OR).

i touch this ripe tomato

1 May 2024 / Editor

Poetry by Amelia Díaz Ettinger

and marvel at how all things
soften—

his voice muted
to warm embers that avoid
scarlet overtones

and my old hands
carved to rice paper,
skin hulled away from bone

even this butcher knife
is dulled from over-care
now it cuts with tenderness

yes,
time’s own waltz,
mollifies all things

and i applaud these parenthesis
of my mouth, how
they enliven my sight

after all they are the repositories
of elapsed laughter

Amelia Díaz Ettinger is a Latinx BIPOC poet and writer. She has three books of poetry and two chapbooks published. Her poetry and short stories have appeared in many literary journals and anthologies.

A Necessary Pause In Transmission

1 April 2024 / Editor

Poetry by Peter Devonald

Solace has a song for you, waiting, waiting, amongst the torrent.
If you don’t choose a day to relax your body will choose one for you.

Noise corrupts and absolute noise corrupts absolutely,
loud whirr of technology never stops, incessantly, ceaseless,

Instead sit in nature, listen, listen, to bird song and insects
reaffirm connections beautiful and obscure.

Take time to read, enjoy and endure your deeper self.
Be someone else, briefly, brilliant and captivating, memory.

Reconnect with friends, remember, remember, the times before
it all changed with vibrant neon, obsequious pleasures, glinting.

Recall the times before you weren’t connected to the miracles,
when simple pleasures were miracles enough to live exquisite.

You know what you really need, you always did, glimpsed
through endless noise and rain, you saw yourself, standing there.

The noise can wait a week without you, trust me, believe in me,
believe in silence, the seas, sagacious shift to embrace serenity.

Peter Devonald is winner of two Heart Of Heatons Awards, Waltham Forest Poetry and joint winner of FofHCS Poetry Award 2023. He has been published extensively and has two Best Of Net nominations. Poet in residence at HAUS-A-REST. Visit www.scriptfirst.com or https://www.facebook.com/pdevonald.

The Block

1 April 2024 / Editor

Poetry by Richard Higgins

The keyboard avoids my fingers’ touch
as if words I need are in its clutch.

My pen sits unused without a care
and lined notebook pages blankly stare.

Neurons fire on an unrelated task
ignoring the questions that I ask.

I have a great story here to tell
but too many memories to quell.

Richard Higgins retired from the nuclear operations business after 50 years and became a writer. He lives in the Detroit Metro area. This is his first published poem.

This April

1 April 2024 / Editor

Poetry by Michael Carrino

Time can be a gentle quiz a dissonant tin drum
Songbirds are silent

It continues to rain Every village road is now
a branch of the river

The past is a vintage red wine
in some dark cellar

The future might only be
black grapes

wasting on a vine as another
ash-stained cloud

creates an illusion Beyond
the slate gray lake

every mountain must be burning

Michael Carrino was co-founder and poetry editor of SUNY Plattsburgh’s literary journal, Saranac Review. He has had nine books of poetry published, most recently, In No Hurry (Kelsay Books, 2021) and Natural Light (Kelsay Books, 2023), as well as individual poems in numerous journals and reviews.

Everything You’ve Ever Loved

1 April 2024 / Editor

Poetry by Robin Greene

Forty years have passed, and this morning you find yourself
alone at sunrise—red and orange overtaking the forested
mountain in front of you, as you sit there, as early light
opens the day, turning it into something mutable.

Most of your life is behind you, but sitting there
on that old wicker chair, you hear a mourning dove’s
coo from a distant tree as a murder of black crows
sweeps the sky. Only then, you remember the midwife

lifting your firstborn from your body—his initial cry marking
the next two decades of your life—a life now almost over.
Then, you’re at a hospital, hearing your mother’s labored
breathing as she lies there, covered in white blankets,

mouth open, eyes closed, and you encourage her release.
Forty years dissolve into weightless memory on this chair,
as you realize that everything you’ve ever loved will leave you,
and that the cooing of the mourning dove is not so premature.

Robin Greene is a former English professor and current part-time yoga and writing instructor, living in NC. She’s published five books: Real Birth: Women Share Their Stories (nonfiction Kindle bestseller); A Shelf Life of Fire (novel); Lateral Drift (poetry); Memories of Light (poetry); and Augustus: Narrative of a Slave Woman (novel).

The Nest

1 April 2024 / Editor

Poetry by Barbara Santucci

For years I’ve watched the towhee build a nest
in the oak tree outside my kitchen window.
She weaves and weaves and never rests
until her home is tightly bound.
Where soon her eggs will lie in a perfection
only this master weaver can create.
Interwoven twigs rest in the branches
ready to shelter the wings of a newborn generation.
In winter, I cup the nest in my hands
and wonder how she knew the composition
that would fashion a home at her breast.

Does this mother know that her weaving
will be the wellspring for her young leaving?

Barbara Santucci has a Masters in Writing for Children from Vermont University and has published three picture books with the W. B. Eerdmans Books for Young Readers. She also has several poems in poetry journals.

Churning

1 April 2024 / Editor

Poetry by Robbie Hess

The sun will rise again tomorrow,
but I’m thinking of my dad tonight
churning the butter of my sorrow.

He beamed a peppery amber glow,
and knew words that made broken hearts all right:
The sun will rise again tomorrow.

He taught me about the bayou willow,
and that gravy rests on the onion’s might,
churning the butter of my sorrow.

Now he is gone, and I am hollow
as an egg without a yolk or white.
The sun will rise again tomorrow.

I sprinkle his ashes in shallow
swamp water and begin to write,
churning the butter of my sorrow.

I wish we’d had more time to borrow.
My heart weeps over this forlorn fight.
The sun will rise again tomorrow,
churning the butter of my sorrow.

Robbie Hess is a Southern poet, and a recent graduate of The University of Alabama.

Category: Poetry (Page 7 of 33)

For the Love of Color: Ochre

Anapana

Just Kids

i touch this ripe tomato

A Necessary Pause In Transmission

The Block

This April

Everything You’ve Ever Loved

The Nest

Churning

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