July 2019 | poetry
Photo p.193
The Great White Way looking north,
February 21, 1964.
The smoke hangs over the street
drifting north from Times Square
where the Camel sign reigns
and the man exhales and exhales
the unfiltered cigarette. My father
burned through three packs a day.
Butts would float on top of urine
in the toilet, evidence that he could piss
and smoke simultaneously. I remember
the unending stream. Here the billboard looms
over Hector’s, a cafeteria, one of many
scattered across Manhattan.
Feb 21 1964, a year my father was alive.
It must have been late when this photo was shot
given the lack of traffic. Two dim headlights
in the foreground. Shadows head downtown.
A record store lights up the lower
right corner, but it’s that rhythmic
smoke, the steady beat of the lungs,
that uninterrupted puff of a man in a cap,
a postman, a policeman, Everyman who sends
a plume into the air like a wish, a halo
reimagined over and over. It just killed
everyone who saw it, even my father.
Paul Lieber
“Interrupted by the Sea,” Paul’s second collection of poetry was published this year. (What Books Press) His first collection, “Chemical Tendencies,”(Tebot Bach) was a finalist in the MSR poetry contest. He also received an honorable mention in the Allen Ginsberg Contest. Twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize, Paul produces and hosts “Why Poetry” on Pacifica radio in L.A. and Santa Barbara. Guests have included Poet Laureates, National Book Award Winners and many known and lesser-known poets. Paul’s poems have appeared in The Moth, N.Y. Quarterly, Patterson Review, Askew, Poemeleon, Alimentum, and many other journals and anthologies. He has taught creative writing in poetry, short stories and playwriting at Loyola Marymount University and facilitates the poetry workshop at Beyond Baroque, the oldest literary institute in Los Angeles. Paul works as an actor and has performed on and off-Broadway and in numerous films and TV shows. paullieber.com
July 2019 | poetry
At kitchen table, I regard my young self
gazing on purple bush.
Chewing sugared walnut,
I’m back savoring Gram’s delectable bread
that disentangled, soothed early years.
I devour another slice under lilac canopy.
Is this a figment, a veil that will soon dissolve?
Inquisitive mood dances festive
when my ears bend to dad’s glee-filled voice
hopping from one Croatian word
to the next sonic utterance.
I open unlocked door to his enticing vibrato.
My dinky feet shuffle, joined hands, clap pure glee.
Can this be real right now, right here?
I know that it is, even as my hair thins silver
looking more like her every day.
These visions, these sounds ferment in me,
sooth as a cradle song.
Some may call these illusions, memories,
nonsense, living in the past, but she is here
so is button accordion on his happy knee.
His slippered feet bounce like gossip at family picnic.
Incandescent images sober me,
when her quiet voice speaks to scatter silence.
“You only live once” resounds.
Eyes look through me as if through a pane of glass.
I see reflected future self as hers.
We sit at long-ago kitchen table,
she uses elegant gestures,
exaggerated movements I recognize as mine.
Understand her molten tenderness—
a hope for my vintage self.
In comfortable drowse we peer out window.
Sprawling sunburst afternoon warms flowering lilac
exactly like it was— pungent and comforting
many years ago, like today, or maybe tomorrow.
I overflow with miraculous zest,
Transfixed into wondering if “we only live once”
is but a slip in time?
Inspiration from “Brief Answers to Big Questions by Stephen Hawking
Marianne Lyon
Marianne has been a music teacher for 43 years. After teaching in Hong Kong, she returned to the Napa Valley and has been published in various literary magazines and reviews including Ravens Perch, TWJM Magazine, Earth Daughters and Indiana Voice Journal. She was nominated for the Pushcart prize in 2017. She is a member of the California Writers Club and an Adjunct Professor at Touro University in California.
July 2019 | poetry
I read somewhere that
Mozart had a pet starling
He called the starling singvogel
or was that an old German toy
He taught the bird to sing a song
or was it the other way around
And did the bird really come
when Mozart called or did it
secretly wish it belonged to
Constanze of the soft breast
instead of Wolfie (Johannes
Chrysostomus Wolfgangus
Theophilus Mozart to give
the man his proper name)
If I had a starling I’d call it
Constanze and ask it to sing
a song about the brief musical
career of Mozart’s starling
an avian concerto from
one composer to another
Sally Zakariya
Sally Zakariya’s poetry has appeared in some 75 print and online journals and been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Her most recent publication is The Unknowable Mystery of Other People (Poetry Box, 2019). She is also the author of Personal Astronomy, When You Escape, Insectomania, and Arithmetic and other verses, as well as the editor of a poetry anthology, Joys of the Table. Zakariya blogs at www.butdoesitrhyme.com.
July 2019 | poetry
“All being can correctly be spoken of with ‘one voice’ (univocity) as John Duns Scotus put it. What I am you also are, and so is the world.” —Richard Rohr: What You See Is What You Are
Today I heard my voice speaking to me from the oak outside the kitchen window. Like a good Quaker, she got right to the point. It is a beautiful day, she said. A dreadful day. The sun is warm and glowing. Burning. Blinding. My voice is alone out here. My voice is part of the history of the world, and everything in it that ever was and ever will be, the roar of the dinosaur, the howl of the baby not yet born, the star exploding into lightyears past. Even the trees themselves singing as they traverse the orbit of their rings of life.
I listened. The silence was stunning. Living. Loud.
Marian Kaplun Shapiro
Marian Kaplun Shapiro, a previous contributor, is the author of a professional book, Second Childhood (Norton, 1988), a poetry book, Players In The Dream, Dreamers In The Play (Plain View Press, 2007) and two chapbooks: Your Third Wish, (Finishing Line, 2007); and The End Of The World, Announced On Wednesday (Pudding House, 2007). A Quaker and a psychologist, her poetry often embeds the topics of peace and violence by addressing one within the context of the other. A resident of Lexington, she is a five-time Senior Poet Laureate of Massachusetts. She was nominated for the Pushcart Prize in 2012.
July 2019 | fiction
Jasmine sat in the chair in the counselor’s office, pressing buttons on her cellphone. “He’s gettin’ executed today.”
“Really? I would have thought it was going to take a bit longer, you know, with all the stays and appeals,” Ms. Freeman said.
“Naww,” Jasmine said, unperturbed. “This is it. Six o’clock this evening.”
“That’s sad.”
“Yeah. I heard he wants a cheeseburger and fries for his last meal.”
“Okay.”
“And a bowl of butter pecan ice cream. He used to like that a lot.” Jasmine glanced at the counselor’s black shoes. They were small on her feet and clean. Every time Jasmine saw Ms. Freeman, she had on those same clean, dainty black shoes. Ms. Freeman sat a few feet away on the outside of her desk; her round, pleasant face oozed with empathy and curiosity.
“How do you feel about it?”
Jasmine shrugged her shoulders. “Nothin’, I guess.” Her fingers worked across the cellphone with slow purpose.
“Well, you have to feel something … he is your brother.” Ms. Freeman couldn’t discern if Jasmine was scrolling through Facebook on her phone or just looking for something to divert her consumed mind. She thought to ask her to put the phone away but decided otherwise.
“Mama said I had another brother that died when he was two days old. Mike gonna be buried next to him.”
“I see. Are you worried for his soul?”
“No more than I am for my own.”
“But you didn’t murder two people.”
“I could’ve stopped him.” Jasmine glanced at Ms. Freeman’s poised hands crossed on her lap. She looked away and stared at a picture of Ms. Freeman and a man. She wondered if Ms. Freeman was married but really didn’t care.
“You were just a child then. What could you have done? I’m sure you felt paralyzed when you saw him raging in the house.”
“I felt like, like the sky opened up and a big dog jumped out of it. Are you worried about your own soul, since you askin’?”
“I do but not like that. I haven’t killed anyone.” Ms. Freeman’s round, pleasant face was nearly pinched with smugness.
“Lucky you. You know, God kills and orders hits every day… He orderin’ them now to kill my brother.”
“No. Mike brought death on his own head. He didn’t have to kill his girlfriend and her lover. He could’ve let it go.”
“How do you know that? Maybe God told him to do it.”
“I know you don’t really believe that. God would never tell us to kill anyone.”
Jasmine’s fingers paused momentarily over her phone. She eyed Ms. Freeman with incredulity. “I guess it was the devil, then.” She returned her gaze to her phone. “Hmmph. My brother sent two bad dogs to heaven. They couldn’t’ve gotten there without him.”
Alifah Omar
Alifah Omar has been writing since a very young age. She has poetry and prose published in Z-composition, The Fable Online and will be featured in Plainsongs’s July 2019 edition.
