October 2024 | poetry
FRAMED
…for my father
To love a person with Alzheimer’s is to learn the song
in their heart and sing it to them when they have forgotten.
– Arne Garborg
He spent years in the basement
at war against forgetting.
Scissors and tape were his weapons,
the conflict relentless,
his ability to recall
anything was vanishing.
He cut up hundreds of old photos,
following the lead of his demolished brain.
Anything he believed excess
he cut from the photo-
trees, cars, houses, the sky.
It was the people he was holding on to.
Like the cat pushing his whiskers into
the corners of walls,
my father rubbed against
the corners of his longing,
leaving a vague imprint of his losses,
the stain of the past he was trying to marshal.
Memories he was
not even aware were lost,
had been swept away.
The chosen were taped
somewhere into a cheap frame
he’d buy at the drug store across the street,
until he could no longer remember where it was.
If someone struck a match
in the trashed warehouse of his brain,
that person was cut from a photo
and taped into his new dwelling-
The Frame of the Familiar.
Everyone overlapped-
the newborn, the aged, the dead,
the teens, the young adults…
it made no difference
whether they had known one another or not,
as long as he thought
he might have known them from somewhere,
from some time now omitted.
To finish, he’d find a photo of himself,
the one person he was still sure he knew.
He’d hunt for a place
to tape himself
in this new world, part color,
part black and white, part sepia.
There were giant people, tiny people,
torn people, faded and stained people,
in this multi-colored person-scape
comprising only those folks
he “sort of” “seemed” to recognize,
even MLK, RFK, JFK, Anita Bryant
made it into a frame.
When a frame was completed
he would take it out to his knotty pine porch,
its walls covered with frames,
grab his Black &. Decker
and drill straight through the frame
and into the wall.
Done.
Onto the next.
He had discovered a way to resurrect
some inner joy,
but the imperative was
to tape securely
lest someone get separated
and forget their way back.
He tamed the rough, curled edges
of the old photos with Scotch-tape,
and brought generations together,
a congregation of the living
alongside their ghost kin,
a population of his own design
of faces remembered,
or faces
he thought he remembered.
John L. Stanizzi
John L. Stanizzi is the author of Ecstasy Among Ghosts, Sleepwalking, Dance Against the Wall, After the Bell, Hallelujah Time!, High Tide – Ebb Tide, Four Bits, Chants, Sundowning, POND, The Tree That Lights The Way Home, Feathers and Bones. Viper Brain, and SEE. John’s work has been widely published. Johnnie’s poems can be found in Rattle, Prairie Schooner, Plainsong, The Cortland Review, American Life in Poetry, The New York Quarterly, Paterson Literary Review, Tar River Review, PoetLore, Potomac Review, and many others. His creative nonfiction has been published in Literature and Belief, Stone Coast Review, Ovunque Siamo, East Coast, After the Pause, Adelaide, Impspired, and many others. His poems have appeared widely in Italy with profound gratitude to his translator, and dear friend, Angela D’ambra. John has read at venues all over New England, including the Mystic Arts Café, the Sunken Garden Poetry Festival, Hartford Stage, and many others. He also coordinated the Fresh Voices Poetry Competition for Young Poets at Hill-Stead Museum, Farmington, Connecticut. A “teaching artist” for the national poetry recitation contest, Poetry Out Loud, John spent a decade with Poetry Out Loud. He is a former Wesleyan University Etherington Scholar, a New England Poet of the Year, and Poet-in-Residence at Manchester Community College and in the Middletown Connecticut School District. In 2021, John was the recipient of a Fellowship in Creative Writing – Non-Fiction, granted to him by the Connecticut Office of the Arts, Culture, and Diversity for work on his new memoir, Bless Me, Father, for I Have Sinned. His short CNF piece Pants was named by its publisher, Potato Soup Journal, “Best of 2022.” John taught literature at Manchester Community College in Manchester, Connecticut, for 26 years. He taught high school English and directed the theater program at Bacon Academy in Colchester, CT. for 24 years; Johnnie put up 42 plays in 24 years. Johnnie lives with his wife, Carol, in Coventry, CT.
October 2024 | poetry
I take in a terrific piano concert: classic
ragtime, boogie-woogie, rhumba-boogie
from New Orleans, a couple of blues numbers.
Professor Longhair tribute. A boogie version
of the national anthem; it never sounded better.
The pianist’s fingers blur; from his left hand
the bass rumbles like a train under the street.
Beside him a drummer sits on a box-drum
he beats time on, and
I’m grooving,
moving
my body all over along with the drumbeat;
doing a jitterbug
sitting down.
Big smile all over my face.
Keeping time with every beat. If only
someone else would stand and dance!
The Texas town that I moved here from, lots
of people would have been up and dancing—
in the aisles, down front, at the back, anywhere
there was room. Shouts and whistles
between numbers, hair and feet flying.
This Midwest audience: the woman next to me
wears a cautious smile. A couple behind me
peer studiously at the pianist. A few people
tap feet or joggle their heads. That’s it?
After each number, polite applause.
I’m totally frustrated! And damn!
That curly-haired drummer is so hot
perched there on his cajón
with his twice-pierced ears
and the stud at the side of his nose.
Lynn D. Gilbert
Lynn D. Gilbert’s poems have appeared in Arboreal, Bacopa Literary Review, Blue Unicorn (Pushcart nomination), Consequence, Footnote, The Good Life Review, Sheepshead Review, and elsewhere. Her poetry volume has been a finalist in the Gerald Cable and Off the Grid Press book contests. A founding editor of Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, she lives in a suburb of Austin and reviews poetry submissions for Third Wednesday journal.
July 2024 | poetry
when moonlight bathes the cold marble of your headstone,
do you cling to the echoes of old laughter?
what burdens sleep in the final exhale?
you, where the tiger lilies won’t bloom
and songbirds fill spaces we cannot see you go
can you tell me if a holy hand found yours adrift
in the currents of a starlit eternity?
or is your faith another fiction?
are my questions dandelion wishes,
seeds fallen where i find you
at the edge of all my doubts,
prayers i’ll never know you hear;
can you feel the ghost of my belief
memories of silence and empty spaces we cannot fathom?
do you know
when i find the flowers dead,
i think of you
Caitie Young
Caitie L. Young (they/them) is a poet and writer from Kent, Ohio, where they earned their MFA in Creative Writing from Kent State University (NEOMFA). Their work has appeared or is forthcoming in Puerto Del Sol, new words {press}, The Atlanta Review, The Sonora Review, The Minnesota Review, and elsewhere. They were the first-place recipient of the 2022 Foothill Editors Prize for best graduate student poetry and are a pushcart nominee.
July 2024 | poetry
Both of us were small, though she,
compliant, soft as white bread,
spent two years in Beginner Swim
for fear of ducking under water.
I’d bike downhill past her house,
where she nestled among four sisters
and brothers, my hands raised
from the handlebars, showing off.
That summer, I sheared Sharon’s
dishwater blond hair at her house,
though outside, away from May,
her harried mother who’d hustle
in seconds from basement to back
yard clothesline, from kitchen to
car port. My plan: to make Sharon’s
bowl cut chic, sleek.
Feeling professional, mature,
I used a spray bottle for styling,
finished with children’s scissors.
I still see Sharon seated on a chair
in her driveway, me standing
above her, both hidden behind
her father’s black Ford truck,
beige tufts sprouting from her head
like clumps of damp hamster fur.
I cried, though we both knew Sharon
would be fine. I was confined to
our house and yard, punished behind
an invisible fence, watched May fly
by in her station wagon, her kids waving
popsicle-sticky hands out the windows,
returning from the community pool.
It was not just my aloneness, my shame.
I felt my plans for summer, plans for
a brave, expansive life, each day
cut shorter.
VA Smith
VA Smith’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in dozens of literary journals and anthologies, among them: Southern Review, Calyx, Crab Creek Review, West Trade Review, and Quartet. Kelsay Books published her first and second poetry collections, Biking Through the Stone Age, 2022, and American Daughters 2023. Her manuscript, Adaptations, is slated for publication in 2025. Her poetry has been nominated several times for Pushcart Prizes. A former Liberal Arts Excellence in Teaching Faculty member at Penn State University, she is currently a staff member at River Heron Review, writing, practicing yoga, and home chefing. Learn more about Virginia’s work at vasmithpoetry.com, or on Instagram and YouTube @vasmithpoetry.
July 2024 | poetry
He did not say you were a crash survivor
Only that you postponed
Death
In an era between
Earth seconds
On a planet where
Hold-onto things
Shatter
And re-form, like something less human
More nimble
While the candy-store gangsters
And digital priests
Tell us otherwise
And so on, etc.,
When we returned in our sharp suits
We shed them,
our hot bodies tattooed, dotted,
like code,
Our old robes stained and dismissed,
lost to lovingly find gold and fight the fire,
your pockets were bulging, my son
and dry leaves in the wind outside a distance palace are twitching
or would you call it dancing?
while we need to waste another one,
and we need to try again
don’t think again about the birds and the prophets
especially the birds,
who have stopped singing their lovely songs about lesser dimensions
Joseph Charles Mollica
Joseph Charles Mollica is a writer originally from Queens, NY.
July 2024 | poetry
There is nothing more that we can do.
His mouth closed firmly like a window sash.
His face composed like laid brick.
Her every nerve thrumming.
His mouth closed firmly like a window sash.
Her fingers, face muscles, pudenda alert.
Her every nerve thrumming.
So it would be now.
Her fingers, face muscles, pudenda alert.
His cup, “World’s Greatest Dad” on his desk.
So it would be now.
No more tomorrow.
His cup, “World’s Greatest Dad” on his desk.
Her husband’s disembodied hand on her thigh.
No more tomorrow.
How will it be?
Her husband’s disembodied hand on her thigh.
The degrees floating on the wall behind.
How will it be?
There will be nothing.
The degrees floating on the wall behind.
The pores on his nose looming large.
There will be nothing.
And there is no God.
The pores on his nose looming large.
His white coat like hardened snow.
There is no God and
There is nothing more that we can do.
Elizabeth Hill
Elizabeth was a Finalist in the 2022 Rattle Poetry Contest, with her poem also appearing as Poem of the Day on February 20, 2023. She was nominated for the 2023 Pushcart Prize by Last Stanza Poetry Journal. Her poetry has been published in 34th Parallel Magazine, Boomerlit, SAND, and Catamaran, among other journals. She is a retired Administrative Law Judge who was responsible for suits between learning-disabled children and the school system. She lives in Harlem, NYC with her husband and two irascible cats.
