A Persistence of Cormorants

January 2024 | poetry

I live near Brooklyn’s Gowanus Canal,

a toxic and fetid tidal estuary from its salted

harbor mouth to its abrupt industrial end.

It is my pixel of wilderness in the city.

 

Tonight I heard the night heron quawk—

Thought it was a ghost. Flight is silence,

a glimpse of white on the wing, a memory

out of reach, the perfect shadow.

 

Cormorants hunt the same water by day

They do not perch. They paddle low

in the water, wings cupped to torso,

eyes up, sudden arch, minimal ripple.

 

Disappear into the murky green.

The plunging pursuit of prey propelled

by black webbed feet. What persistence

it must take to hunt in such dismal silt.

 

Poets know the tired metaphor of truths

that lie beneath the surface. Know the patient

wait to snatch a glimpse of glimmer. But

to swim, to hunt in our turbid psyches,

 

where madness lurks, or doubloons wait,

takes a persistence of cormorants.

 

Gerald Wagoner

Gerald Wagoner, author of When Nothing Wild Remains, (Broadstone Books, 2023), and A Month of Someday, (Indolent Books, 2023) says his childhood was divided between Eastern Oregon and Cut Bank, Montana, where he was raised under the doctrine of benign neglect. Gerald has lived in Brooklyn, NY since 1982. He exhibited widely and taught Art & English for the NYC Department of Education. 2018: Visiting Poet Residency Brooklyn Navy Yard. 2019, 2021-23: Curator/ host of A Persistence of Cormorants, an outdoors reading series by the Gowanus Canal. 2023 April, Poets Afloat Mini-Residency, Waterfront Barge Museum. Education: U of Montana, BA Creative Writing, 1970, SUNY Albany, MA & MFA Sculpture Selected Publications:  Beltway Quarterly, BigCityLit, Blue Mountain Review, Cathexis Northwest Press, Night Heron Barks, Ocotillo Review, Right Hand Pointing, Maryland Literary Review.

Jeremiah A. Gilbert

January 2024 | visual art

Saksun, Faroe Islands II

Saksun, Faroe Islands III

Jeremiah A. Gilbert

Jeremiah Gilbert is an award-winning photographer and travel writer based out of Southern California. His travels have taken him to over a hundred countries and territories spread across six continents. His photography has been published internationally and exhibited worldwide. He is the author of three travel books, including Can’t Get Here from There: Fifty Tales of Travel and From Tibet to Egypt: Early Travels After a Late Start. His most recent, On to Plan C, documents his return to travel in a post-pandemic world and is the first to include his photography. He can be found on Instagram @jg_travels

Fabio Sassi

January 2024 | visual art

City cracks

Imaginary map

Rock & chain

Fabio Sassi

Fabio Sassi makes photos and acrylics using whatever is considered to have no worth by the mainstream. He often puts a quirky twist to his subjects or employs an unusual perspective that gives a new angle of view. Fabio lives in Bologna, Italy, and his work can be viewed at www.fabiosassi.foliohd.com

Rebecca Pyle

January 2024 | visual art

Door Knocker, Bordeaux, France

Rebecca Pyle

Rebecca Pyle is an artist whose work (drawings, photographs, oil paintings) appears as images in many art/literary journals, including MAYDAY, Watershed Review, TINT, The Moving Force Journal, New England Review, Gris-Gris, West Trestle Review and La Piccioletta Barca. Rebecca is also a writer of fiction and poetry and essays. American, she is living most of this year in Europe; find her in rebeccapyleartist.com.

Lucha

January 2024 | poetry, Pushcart nominee

I attended a party hosted by one of my university

English professors. The party was timid. Everyone

in a house full of friendless people. Soon, I see

my professor is flirting on my date. I am across the patio

talking to a stoned lonely classmate near the nacho

salsa station, and my prof, swinging jigging away,

making my date giggle, smile, move, bob and sway.

 

The world is glorious and cruel. Full of voids

impossible to fill and so hard to ignore.

 

My professor was working hard to diminish

his middle-age pansa: running his hand through his hair,

leaning forward, holding that cigarette but not lighting it.

Does this really work? When does his ex step in? And I wonder

if this is me in twenty years. Drifting to bad jazz, citing Derrida,

considering busted summers in Prague, then back to all this,

hosting a house of students and colleagues

without anyone causing a lucha, because no one thinks anything

is worth throwing a punch. Nada happens.

 

I had this friend who launched off a table

in a crowded bar because he saw his novia

dancing with a gringo. Did my friend think she really

had a Sancho? (Remember this: action is often a good

remedy for grief). He flew into the dancers,

a super-villain returning to earth. His cape a flash

of cursing. A big fight, the boogying couples scattering

off the dancefloor. After the incident, and him

banished from the club, I spied him and la novia, seated

on a curb in the parking lot. She cupping his face

in tenderness insisting, she loved him, loved

him.  Chanting it. The night sky believing all

of her. My friend looking down into the alley,

discovering his bruises, adjusting his ripped

camisa, her words all shadow and dusk.

 

Christopher Rubio-Goldsmith

Christopher Rubio-Goldsmith was born in Merida, Yucatan, grew up in Tucson, Arizona and taught English at Tucson High School for 27 years. Much of his work explores growing up near the border, being raised biracial/bilingual, and teaching in a large urban school where 70% of the students are American/Mexican. A Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee, his writings will appear in Drunk Monkeys, Inverted Syntax and have been published in Sky Island Journal, Muse, Discretionary Love and other places too. His wife, Kelly, sometimes edits his work, and the two cats seem happy.