Featured Author, Ditta Baron Hoeber

January 2024 | poetry

Untitled (Coke was taller than most women)

Coke was taller than most women and moved in a way that somehow provoked anticipation     watching
her cross a room you wondered if this splendid thing would actually happen to you     same with her voice
with everything she’d say and I remember that her eyes were grey

and Jimmy     once Jimmy kissed me     I couldn’t have been more than fourteen when Jimmy kissed me
his mouth seemed to take me over and afterwards I ran away     but stayed kissed all afternoon

I saw Coke on the bus wearing a mink jacket one morning and big diamonds looking a handsome late
thirties on her second marriage twelve year old child and she says Jimmy’s got his masters degree and his
wife’s a nurse and Coke says that Mileage whose black moon face and joke on you laughter used to
frighten me     has passed away

Untitled (when things get bad enough)

when things get bad enough

I start wishing I would die.

actually, I had intended to say,

when things get bad enough

I start wishing other people would die

so I would be left

the pleasures of abandonment.

you mentioned the word suicide today

I caught it in my teeth and

carried it home to put in a poem.

I am not respectful enough its true

of me of you

but thank you for the word.

Untitled (I have a small book)

I have a small book with yellow covers and half translucent pages.     I thought of using it as a drawing
book but never did because I imagined the drawings would bleed through to each other in disturbing
ways.  but now I have the idea of making my first drawing on the last page of the book, so I can see it as I
draw on the page that comes before.     that way I can design that second drawing to relate to the first.
and so on.

Ditta Baron Hoeber

An artist and a poet, Ditta Baron Hoeber’s poems have been published in a number of magazines including Noon: journal of the short poem, Gargoyle, the American Journal of Poetry, Juxtaprose, Pank, Burningword Literary Journal, the American Poetry Review, and Contemporary American Voices. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and her first book, Without You, is forthcoming in March of 2024. Her photographs, drawings, and book works have been exhibited nationally and acquired by several collections in the US and the UK.

A Death of Logic

January 2024 | poetry

In another dimension, it is me & not Dostoevsky

who claims 2-plus-2 can equal 5.

I have pressed TV rewind enough times

to see how toothpaste can slide right back into the tube

after dissolving across teeth & draining into the sink.

The vomit gurgitates itself back into a glass of kegged beer.

I have seen blood pour itself back into the vein, from wine.

& who is to say that after her father laid himself to rest

under the commuter train that he didn’t lift his body

back into another world

where we are still twelve years old

at Fenway Park. At the seventh inning stretch,

he holds both a beer, & a camera

to capture our sweet Caroline smiles.

O, ode to the Jeremy Bearimy!

To be a dot in the I

& repeat that one life

forever and without time.

A place where nothing never happens.

I mean, if Leo himself can climb through a dream

inside a dream, then why not me?

There could be a galaxy in which I’m seen.

In which my body was never taken away from me.

A world in which I can spot love

3 trillion miles away.

I can hold it in my palms:

a crystal ball of intimacy.

A life in which your death is only a death in flesh.

& when your bones crumble to ash, they will

sprout with the grass,

germinate with the morning dew.

Yes, you will be reborn in a different world –

you will arrive again, as you.

Lis Beasley

Lis Beasley (she/her) is a licensed mental health counselor. She was previously published in the Worcester Review. A lifelong writer, her poetry often explores the intersection of family, mental health, substance abuse, and incarceration. She can be found on Instagram @lisbeaspoetry.