July 2023 | poetry
Seventh Summer
A not so rare November day
that impersonates June,
bisque of sun,
Ligurian sky
when Sylvia, from the mailroom,
who walks with a cane,
/diabetes to claim
her right foot by spring/
joins me outside for a forbidden smoke.
Beautiful day, I say.
How do we make sense of it?
says Sylvia’s face
before casting alarm at the glaciers
melting in Alaska
and I share what I’ve heard
about the snow crab season
Cancelled, I tell her.
95% gone.
I can’t stop thinking of the fishermen, I say,
about to lose their livelihoods.
And all those people just being born,
she pines,
never knowing the sweetness of crab.
Delicata
Leo [the farmer] will die this afternoon,
forehead damp with kisses
from Gene [the tractor supplier]
and Dusty [the grower of feed corn],
queer but summoned gestures
from sturdy men
who talk with their hands.
Home remedies for Leo
meant the clench of his gut
metastasized
like the summer squash
in his tomato beds.
Goddamn volunteers.
We knew Leo from his blue eggs
and spiral notepad in his chest pocket
and honor stand on the side of the road.
Take what you want.
Leave your money in the jar.
He stood tightwire
on wood ladders to repair the plastic
of his hoop house with duct tape
and fed composting scraps
to a blind raccoon
[who stuck around].
Leo will die as so many farmers die,
shallow of air,
tallying from his bed,
wondering if he should have returned to church
all those years back
[when his wife begged him to],
the spent soil
of hundreds of thousands of fingerling potatoes
making rich, verdant crops
of his nails.
Christy Prahl
Christy Prahl is the author of the collection We Are Reckless (Cornerstone Press, 2023). A Best of the Net and two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, her past and future publications include the Penn Review, Salt Hill Journal, Eastern Iowa Review, and others. She has held residencies at both Ragdale and the Writers’ Colony at Dairy Hollow and is the founder of the PenRF reading series. She splits her time between Chicago and rural Michigan and appreciates subways and siloes in equal measure. More of her work can be found at christyprahl.wixsite.com/christy-prahl.
July 2023 | poetry
Mother didn’t talk much.
Didn’t want to fall foul
of the thought police.
There was the ugly guy with the cruel, crooked mouth
who owned the house and loved his chickens.
He believed.
‘Heil Hitler’.
We’d brought our blackboards.
My old teacher had a desk on a raised platform.
When it was all over,
Mother hung out a white sheet
from the bedroom window.
The new teacher taught us Russian.
Bald underneath this huge black fur hat.
His yellow teeth as large as a horse’s. Threw
that unruly boy down the school’s stone steps.
The wheels of tanks looming over me.
My brother made me an airplane from balsawood.
We continued to listen to AFN Europe—
my brother had crafted a crystal radio
from a cigar box.
The Russians changed the street names
and the portraits on the school walls.
Rose Mary Boehm
Rose Mary Boehm is a German-born British national living and writing in Lima, Peru, and author of two novels as well as seven poetry collections. Her poetry has been published widely in mostly US poetry reviews (online and print). She was twice nominated for a Pushcart. Her latest: Do Oceans Have Underwater Borders? (Kelsay Books July 2022), Whistling in the Dark (Cyberwit July 2022), and Saudade (December 2022) are available on Amazon. www.rose-mary-boehm-poet.com
April 2023 | poetry
Palely the residues of evening coalesce
to form this faint ablation sailing over head,
this lustrous oculus in daybreak’s alabaster dome,
this remnant of the jeweled dark that wanly
drifts across the dawn’s triumphant light.
O fading psychopomp of evening’s gaudy glitter,
priestess of our midnight signs and assignations,
in morning’s scant attire you prophesy the vacancy
of noon where thought hangs heavy in the mind
and yearning looms like smoke in sunlit haze.
Yet how much nearer now in gauzy negligée you seem
than in the incandescent robe you wore last night,
how menacingly close do you appear and closing fast,
as though some furtive faintness hurrying after us
lay almost in our reach but too remote to grasp.
DB Jonas
DB Jonas is an orchardist living in the Sangre de Cristo mountains of northern New Mexico. Born in California in 1951, he was raised in Japan and Mexico. His work has recently appeared in Tar River, Blue Unicorn, Whistling Shade, Neologism, Consilience Journal, The Ekphrastic Review, Innisfree Poetry Journal, The Decadent Review, The Amphibian, Revue {R}évolution, Kairos, and others. His first collection, Tarantula Season, is scheduled for release in 2023.
April 2023 | poetry
I navigate this world,
kneading dough for company
as I swirl about memories
like tea
in a delicate chipped cup–
I move through the stars
spheres rotate between seconds
and I whisper to crystals when you are gone:
for the closets were just emptied of camping gear–
and when I sleep through the sleet and snow
the umbilical cord is released
before I rush into my own ravine.
Cosmic scissors unchain my feet:
I scribble secrets within the sacred box
and wait for cherubs to rush before me,
fluttering scents amongst the ripening seeds.
Caroline Reddy
Caroline Reddy’s work has been published in Active Muse, Calliope, Clinch, Clockwise Cat, Deep Overstock, Grey Sparrow, International Human Rights Arts Festival, Star*line and Tupelo Quarterly Review among others. In the fall of 2021, her poem “A Sacred Dance” was nominated for the Best of The Net prize by Active Muse. Caroline Reddy was born in Shiraz, Iran and participated in Mohammad Barrangi’s exhibition-Playing in Wonderland. Caroline Reddy also performed her poetry and presented an artist talk with VALA Gallery pertaining to the events in Iran womenlifefreedom-Zan-Zendegi-Azadi.
April 2023 | poetry
For Ellie
You say you caught yourself wondering if
the world would be
when you were gone.
Rumpled bed sheets rumpled bedsheets.
The sound of a small brass bell to ring for help
the sound of a small brass bell.
Hair comb in hand at the ready
to fix the damage from hands patting your head.
I wonder why
the vase of ranunculus and baby’s breath
sits on the kitchen counter.
You ask about images of a woman
floating behind me.
We spend the hour reciting small histories.
I ask about the light. What color.
Gold, you say,
pointing at the carpet of gingko leaves
falling throughout the day.
Grateful we don’t rake them up.
Joan M. White
Joan White lives in Vermont where she spends her time with plants and language. Her work has been published in American Journal of Poetry, Cider Press Review, Abstract Magazine, NPR’s On Being Blog, among others.
April 2023 | poetry
I thought this poem might be
about children, but I found
Maxine Cumin’s collection Nurture
as I sifted through piles of books,
the title which implies children
but isn’t about children at all
and anyway, I keep calling the book Nature
because I do that. I see a word
and read it as another,
change one letter in my mind,
superimpose what’s not there,
and let’s be honest, what’s not
in the title is here as I sit
on a deck that overlooks
the St. Vrain River, the sound
of water caught somewhere
between its potential of thunderous
rushing and the quick patter
of rain falling from the edge of the eaves,
the latter the only sound of water
this girl might really know,
and I do believe I must have changed
one letter somewhere, must have
superimposed this place over cracked
pavement, superimposed the dogleg
bend in the river, over water that flows
around curbs into storm sewers,
and while this all seems real enough,
a black plastic bag is caught
in a nearby tree. It hangs,
expanding and contracting
like a loose lung.
Cristina Trapani-Scott
Cristina Trapani-Scott is a writer and artist who lives in the foothills of the Colorado Rocky Mountains with her partner. Her work has been published in the Paterson Literary Review, Hip Mama Magazine, Cleaver Magazine, and Orca: A Literary Journal, among others. She also holds an MFA in writing from the Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Writing at Spalding University. In addition, she teaches creative writing online and serves on the leadership team of the Writing Heights Writers Association. She also is a contributing editor at the Good River Review.
