Sheree La Puma is an award-winning writer whose personal essays, fiction and poetry have appeared in or are forthcoming in O:JA&L, Burningword Literary Journal, I-70 Review, Inflectionist Review, Levee, Crack The Spine, Mad Swirl, The London Reader, Gravel, Foliate Oak, PacificReview, Westwind and Ginosko Literary Review, among others. She received an MFA in Writing from California Institute of the Arts and taught poetry to former gang members.
it’s a question of relativity
ignorant view that there are two
split down the middle a brain’s
how and how not to see landscape
or hear a heartbeat an echo
a distraction from the other
and me thing and essence each
where are we even free
cut through the dry ochred earth
we need borders to cross
and again in almost
of work the transportation business
deficit and accrual an increase
effort of balancing side
is an abstraction rocking us
align to misalign
to the enormous
an exposure of the usual
sides
consciousness divided
when we look outside
detect a rhyme one
by turns stroke evoke you
requiring for identity the other
to fly over this road
this line drawn in the sand
to find ourselves again
the same place this line
a kind of attention
of possible answers in the physical
by side even eye movement
from limbic to critique
a door swung wide
all we could ever ask
Alice B Fogel is the New Hampshire poet laureate. Her collections include A Doubtful House, Interval: Poems Based on Bach’s “Goldberg Variations,” which won the Schaffner Award for Music in Literature & the 2016 NH Literary Award, & Be That Empty, a national bestseller in 2008. Strange Terrain is her guide to appreciating poetry without necessarily “getting” it. Nominated ten times for the Pushcart, she has been awarded a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, among other awards, & her poems have appeared in many journals & anthologies, including Best American Poetry, Spillway, Hotel Amerika, The Inflectionist, & DIAGRAM.
Her parents, for reasons she did not fully understand, didn’t attend church. Ever. Her father said nature was his church, but, on the other hand, so many millions believed otherwise, who was he to judge the merits of indoor, group-oriented worship? He drew the line at smoke bombs and hocus-pocus; he wouldn’t even read fiction because he only wanted to learn facts. Her mother saw no point without such evocative pageantry, but she didn’t want any trouble at home.
They didn’t want to deprive the girl, their only child, of wholesome church-going social normalcy, nor, certainly, any possibility, however remote, of everlasting life. So, at 11, she was left to the mercy of, briefly, the Pentecostals and later, more lastingly, the Nazarenes. (After all, moderate factions don’t recruit.) She was as good a Sunday school student as she was a student-student, the girl who grew up to earn a PhD and three master’s degrees, and her teacher, Mr. Meadows, offered her the unprecedented opportunity to prepare and teach a Sunday school lesson to her peers.
What was he thinking? They paid her elaborate, lavish inattention, doodling, passing notes and chatting with one another, sighing and fidgeting as if she weren’t there, until Mr. Meadows broke in and took over. She stayed, she had to, they carpooled rides home for orphans like herself.
She could not, however, muster the perspective to return. A month later Mr. Meadows, jilted lover, appeared at their door, to say that one day she’d be a wonderful teacher. As her father jumped up and stood, spread like an X in front of the card table littered with ashtrays and beer cans, she understood.
Julie Benesh’s fiction has been in Tin House Magazine, Bestial Noise: A Tin House Fiction Reader, Crab Orchard Review (receiving an Illinois Arts Council Grant), Florida Review, Gulf Stream, and other places. Micro-memoirs are forthcoming from Journal of Compressed Creative Arts and Green Briar Review. She has an MFA in fiction from Warren Wilson College and lives in Chicago.
He is a bird of bad moral character. He does not get his living honestly. —Ben Franklin
Right after my mother moved
to South Carolina, a man approached her
after church to show her the Confederate flag
in a stained glass window.
If this took place in a novel,
most readers would be able to deconstruct
the authorial intent
implied by a white man
showing a black woman
his heritage.
In Los Angeles, I drove an Oldsmobile,
a symbol of American engineering,
mass production, luxury . . .
It was a couch on wheels,
and one the most likely vehicles
to be used in the commission of a crime.
I could roam the streets of South Central
with impunity,
but in the Valley
I’d be pulled over for DWB.
In the rain and through a green-caged enclosure,
I marveled at a maimed bald eagle
and pondered at how
before the Constitution, the presidency,
the Bill of Rights, we placed it on a seal,
minted it,
then took it near extinction.
It shrugged its 6-feet of wings
and let out
an impressive scat.
Michele Reese is a Daughter of the American Revolution and the daughter of a Jamaican immigrant. Her poetry focuses on this place of intersection as well as others including race, gender, and sexuality. She is the author of the poetry collection Following Phia. Her poems have also been published in several journals and anthologies including Crack the Spine Literary Magazine, The Oklahoma Review, Poetry Midwest, The Paris Review, The Tulane Review, Chemistry of Color: Cave Canem South Poets Responding to Art, Hand in Hand: Poets Respond to Race, and Home is Where: An Anthology of African American Poets from the Carolinas. She is currently a Professor of English at the University of South Carolina Sumter.
A turnstile coin
falls in slow motion,
hits with a rattle and a clink.
Rolling to a stop at his feet.
I bend to pick it up,
retrieving long lost visions
of a love that used to be.
Turning from the past,
I walk away.
A burning ache
pulls at me,
filling my heart with sorrow.
I look back one last time.
Coin pocketed,
I board the train
to my redemption.
Ann Christine Tabaka was nominated for the 2017 Pushcart Prize in Poetry, has been internationally published, and won poetry awards from numerous publications. She is the author of 9 poetry books. Christine lives in Delaware, USA. She loves gardening and cooking. Chris lives with her husband and two cats. Her most recent credits are: Ethos Literary Journal, North of Oxford, Pomona Valley Review, Page & Spine, West Texas Literary Review, The Hungry Chimera, Sheila-Na-Gig, Synchronized Chaos, Pangolin Review, Foliate Oak Review, Better Than Starbucks!, The Write Launch, The Stray Branch, The McKinley Review, Fourth & Sycamore.
