July 2021 | poetry
Six weeks
after I began ninth grade,
Mother went to bed.
She closed drapes, hid
autumn light, knotted
her body beneath winter blankets.
Seven years earlier,
her brother went to work
then crawled under his desk,
mumbling.
White jackets took him away
and whispers I overheard
spoke of electroshock therapy,
depression.
Confused by my feelings,
I asked no forgiveness
for liking the new quiet,
but it felt strange
to exist without her anger,
her disappointment.
I pedaled to the cemetery,
walked among tombstones,
sorting my unsettled mind
as I questioned skeletal remains.
There was John, the soldier
from South Carolina
whose brother had disappeared.
But not under blankets.
I asked James, the eldest
of ten children, what he knew
about living in the dark.
He kept it simple, suggested
I leave her alone,
get on with my life.
I bemoaned my transfer
to a new school,
but Daniel, who grew up
on a farm in south Georgia,
laughed, said school was school
and I should just shut up.
Or pack a bag and run away.
My choice.
I thanked them all,
bid them good night
and rode home
as streetlights began to buzz.
Is she thinking
about my mistakes,
storing up punishment
and criticism to use
when she gets well?
Will she get well?
And who is cooking dinner?
Linda Wimberly
Linda Wimberly is a writer, artist and musician from Marietta, GA. A former Vermont Studio Center resident in writing, her poetry has appeared in The Raw Art Review, Lunch Ticket, Stone River Sky: An Anthology of Georgia Poems and others and a short story appeared in Cricket. She is a self-taught abstract artist and her images have appeared in or been cover art for jelly bucket, Critical Pass Review, Inscape Magazine and others. Her image “Woman on the Move” won the 2019 Art Contest for So to Speak: feminist journal of language and art. (lindawimberly.com)
July 2021 | nonfiction
Style is born, I told my students the other day, when writers lose themselves in writing they admire. Gay, urban, sex-loving Jewish Allen Ginsberg could and did recite all 193 lines of straight, bucolic, prudish, Christian John Milton’s 17th century elegy, “Lycidas.” Clicking my way to Ginsberg’s poem, “Howl,” I added, “And see—Ginsberg’s style is unmistakable!”
I read the beginning aloud. I’d forgotten it contains the phrase, “through the negro streets.” As I read, I wondered, “will some student report me to the Dean for saying an offensive, racist word?” I asked myself how often I think of a writer whom I wish to mention, then find, while I’m already reading aloud, some term that could get twisted into a meaning neither I nor the poet intend.
The problem’s worse when I teach Maya Angelou and Mark Twain, both of whose writings contain words this journal probably won’t print. Consider how much the euphemism “n-word” undermines their efforts. Angelou’s writing cannot be separated from her experience as a black person growing up in the Jim Crow South any more than Mark Twain’s experience as a white person growing up in a slave-owning family can be separated from his experience as a writer. These writers have the right to expect readers not to censor their language. The words of those who have the literary power for these uncensored words to inspire sadness and joy in all of us should not be expurgated.
But if I use the word, and if a student complains, any discussion I might try to have about how I and the class vicariously experience the sadness, the terrors of either of their lives, about how I and the class, through our common humanity, feel identified with their writers, would be rejected—and would be rejected by a number of New York Times journalists who are writing, and printing, things like, “I don’t ever want to hear that word come out of a white person’s mouth.”
For writers, censorship and bowdlerizing remain signs of disrespect. I do worse than dishonoring writers by euphemizing their words. I create a fantasy dogma in which black people feel one thing and white people feel another, neither can understand the other, and both are filled with fear. The point of literature gets lost. Forbidden words become powerful, fetishized.
I know what Allen Ginsberg would say: “America, why are your libraries full of tears?”
Melissa Knox
Melissa Knox’s recent writing appears in Another Chicago Magazine, Image Journal, and WOW. Her book, Divorcing Mom: A Memoir of Psychoanalysis, was published by Cynren in 2019. Read more of her writing here: https://melissaknox.com
July 2021 | poetry
Our clock.
Do you remember? The one we bought at the edge of the world? The shop being pulled into the ocean ? She has rounded the bend. She’s played her song.
The crickets still chirp. The moon still shines.
Outside, the world is covered in silver dust. Outside, the trees and the stones are getting colder and colder and colder.
Let’s agree that pajamas are for puritans. We are of this world. We were made to sleep with feathers. We were made for open windows. We were made to be together.
Ask the scientists. There is a temperature perfect for sleeping. It’s the temperature of you and me close enough to warm, but not close enough to burn.
Pajamas, my darling, only get in the way.
Shawn Pfunder
Shawn Pfunder is a writer, performer, and creative coach. He studied poetry and fiction at the University of Montana. He is the author of the poetry book, I Believe in a God Who Roller Skates. Shawn lives in Phoenix, Arizona with a medium-sized dog.
July 2021 | poetry, Pushcart nominee
When we were kids, in junior school
in Pembrokeshire, we didn’t do wild
or joyful, didn’t do great and glorious.
We wore limp ties, half-skewed,
over blue-green cotton shirts, grey shorts,
and tugged long, drooping woollen socks.
We hoarded foreign stamps, played marbles,
were drilled in tables, verbs and chalk,
hoofed at a soggy leather football.
There were a few quick early sallies
down the rapids of River Joy, first sounds
maybe of Elvis, first scents of dances,
first date .. but that was soon washed up
on the banks of embarrassment.
One first big joy, first rush of rhapsody,
was our trip to the London Planetarium,
the sunrise scene, to Morning from Peer Gynt,
and the sense of a wondrous opening-out.
The price, as I remember, was a shilling.
First weeks in university. Posters and politics
and arguments over midnight coffee
and then, with such a shot to the emotions,
the new black friends in the hall of residence,
Femi from Nigeria, Zac from Ghana,
Astley from Jamaica. Back home we’d read
of Windrush and Brixton and rioting
and landladies (no dogs, no blacks, no Irish).
Now suddenly these charming, genial men.
The fellowship. The joy of it.
That was October 1960
and it seemed absurdly simple.
Robert Nisbet
Robert Nisbet is a Welsh poet whose work has appeared recently in the USA in San Pedro River Review, Main Street Rag, Third Wednesday, Burningword Literary Journal, and many online journals. He has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
July 2021 | poetry
Into the foothills:
individuated and
intentional, like tumuli,
poised in geometric solitude;
yet reiterant—
battologizing in every direction
like a lavish obsession;
Over the clatter of lava scree,
down stress-cracked arroyos
polyped with balsamroot,
astride dustracks canine and human,
over roots of gnarled fir that
knuckle the trail like black fingers.
Into the foothills, then,
you run—
without optimism,
suspecting all summits false,
enduring your own shadowy weather—
unending systems of shifting mentalese;
Overtaking strangers wordless
and passing through strands of huddled pine
sunk with errant shafts of yellow light,
networks of crows bruiting your
course in the canopies above.
With ragged breath and aching limb,
you are lifted and lowered,
left to pursue protracted arcs,
like the practitioner of an esoteric ritual,
like the epigone of a mathematical formula.
Compacted and sunbaked into pavement
the path rattles talus and tibia,
climbs the fickle architecture of your spine,
and delivers spoonfuls of annihilation.
Into the foothills, then,
you are running—
not speaking,
but hanging on
the susurrus of the breeze,
listening intently,
trying to hear the urgent call of the world.
James F. Latin
Jimmy Latin is in his fourth year of Honours English at Concordia University (Montreal). He writes poetry, fiction, and non-fiction.
