January 2023 | poetry
Waterfall: Speech
Beginning things
Armed figures emerge from the falls
Beautiful destroyers
A splash-live slapdash
Bodies, shapes
not of earth
but of the vapor, air
Atmospherics of the place
Creatures of pure emergence
Emanations ghosting home
Back from everwhere/neverwhere to here-again
Figures of air, frozen waves
The message and the static
incantation of the nation
The fire-stream on auto-mation
Energies of embarkation
First love, first life, verse indication
Inspiration of the waters
In the waters, breath and life
and if heard, attended to, rehearsal predication
Emergence of the word
Stents and stems and birdlike wonder
Self-dom seen and ever heard
Translation of an endless pulse
through the rumble of the verse
Clamor of the ancient lovers
Hunters herders growers
Builders, bearers, all immerse
Always Beginning
Capable figures emerge from the falls
Heroes, children, goddesses
From the spirit fog of old talk, weary tales, twining tales
from spheres of culpable imagination
Tails still scrapping over dogs
Powder-dust foundation lays, thought-dreams of a summer day,
Bees whine in the vernal haze
Pleasure-spots of time, feeling foci, laugh-prone languors
Tiny-voiced choruses squealing jokey
Laughter of the cells, ticklish moments
Parting of the particles
Pleasure-stoppers floating fee
Choruses squealing you and me
Beautiful creatures, beasts, fork-legged and otherwise
Birds indifferently joyful in their distant, facile way
Poppies dancing in an orange breeze, a whisper of moistened breath
Winged notions, messages from fore-n’after
Saxon farmers trenching the earth at Sutton Hoo
Beginning tales told to indifferent laughter
On the banks of the Indus heroes woo
Healing mothers, earth fighters, soul-warriors
Magicking quick-silvers, bent farmers, squatting pioneers of fertility
Breathing in//out, in//out at the start of things
Where to now? Clouds briefing in a gray bowl of beginnings
Hero-makers already emergent
Silvered Celts, backdating ancestry,
mothers sewing fates in silken vests,
Sands slipping free of oceans crests.
History and geology
Hegelian phenomenology
Starting from Paumanok
Fog-lifted meres, moan of the ocean, breath on loan
Too great a falling from thought-free height
as well, a swell, swelling
Falling to our fateful night
A wave that curls at the crest, then lingers, lapping,
ever-falling…
From the bowl of endlessly thinning ions
Figures emerge, men like lions
personae dramatis
Descend, like flowers
wilting backwards into life
Time, place, and hours
from the wispy, water-bearded face of the milky stream,
A paintbox of the gods upset, apocals…
lisps and sometimes worse
Scattering the nimbus to the you-in-verse
Dicing godes, explodes
Cinematic modes
What’s this, amiss in the midst?
Some body chasing some self-likeness
about the city’s walls, men’s work no doubt
Hunting fate like beasts, a many-headed rout
Mythopoeia steamy inspirations and gastric odors mingling
after, or before, the brazen hunt for doubles singling
The mother-goddess sewing the great table-cloth of fate,
Tapestry of time, winding sheet, rushing stream,
a day too early, a day too late,
down from mountains of thunder-gods
to the banks of the Indus,
the sands of Byblos,
the killing ground of fair Iona
A lifeline-like songline born from the fires of a conflagration
Many-stepped disaster for a busting nation, foretold by asters
poking upward, inches beyond the spray of the great uncanny falls
to find, once more a flume’s foundation, earth-bound estranged,
endangered, a soul’s vocation.
Robert Knox
Robert Knox is a poet, fiction writer, and Boston Globe correspondent. As a contributing editor for the online poetry journal, Verse-Virtual, his poems appear regularly on that site. They have also appeared in journals such as The American Journal of Poetry, New Verse News, The Eunoia Review, and others. His poetry chapbook “Gardeners Do It With Their Hands Dirty” was nominated for a Massachusetts Best Book award. He was the winner of the 2019 Anita McAndrews Poetry Award.
January 2023 | poetry
For Maggie
These roses always rose from their roots—
but thorns—rootstock and scion—still carve flesh
and only thrive on a diet of blood.
Each spring we planted Peace. It came up blood.
Grandma damned the thorns and swore
these roses always rose from their roots.
Last spring, I laid Peace in the Earth—
She’s been fleeing the Nazis since 1939.
Nazi and rose throve on a diet of blood.
This September, zombie Heinrich Himmler came for her.
I pressed his flesh and bones into the Earth—
These Nazis always rose from their roots—
giving strange roses—red and yellow—black and white—
just thorns, really—but, enough to kill Grandma—
poisoned peaceless by a diet of blood—
I placed her in the earth too. Blood in blood—
Peace—failed xenograft—more zombies at the door—
these Nazis always rose from their roots.
Peace!?
b l o o d
g
o
l
d
ashes
ashes
we all fall
down
Joshua St. Claire
Joshua St. Claire is an accountant who works as a corporate controller in rural Pennsylvania. His poetry has been published in Mayfly, The Delmarva Review, ubu., and The Ghost City Review, among others. He is Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee. His work was included in the 2022 Dwarf Stars Anthology, and he is the winner of the 2022 Gerald Brady Memorial Senryu Award.
January 2023 | poetry
I was sure the long-abused-
by-climate bougainvillea dead
after years of pink tissue-paper blossoms
each winter, branches seeking light against
cold window glass in its corner. This year
all, all leaves were alitter on the floor
and the branches turned to brittle sticks.
My daughter begged a reprieve
with one more try, moving it from where
its waterings drained down to the soil
of a geranium, which lapped liquid up
and blooms. We added soil and planted
the stickety sticks that were left
into a bigger, water tight pot to keep
the draining moisture available, found a place
to catch a little sun without thorny branches
scratching stray passersby. Now tiny and
the silkiest of leaves appear,
thin slips of green,
fragile … tentative. They seem
so unlikely that I find it hard to believe
in them. I finger them in passing, touch
slender promise and remember all all
of the unlikely salvations strewn down
my many years … and again hope.
Carol Hamilton
Carol Hamilton has retired from teaching 2nd grade through graduate school in Connecticut, Indiana and Oklahoma, from storytelling and volunteer medical translating. She is a former Poet Laureate of Oklahoma and has published 19 books and chapbooks: children’s novels, legends and poetry. She has been nominated ten times for a Pushcart Prize. She has won a Southwest Book Award, Oklahoma Book Award, David Ray Poetry Prize, Byline Magazine literary awards in both short story and poetry, Warren Keith Poetry Award, Pegasus Award and a Chiron Review Chapbook Award.
January 2023 | poetry
Olives Keep Secrets
Green limbs, olive-heavy, on a bluff over a rich-blue sea,
hold the eye so the mind can focus, press the shutter,
record the moment in waves of chemistry, file it away in
labyrinths, while the blood flutters, seeks to drown
the waves, put them to rest, quiet the restless talk.
Fingers grasp the fruit tenderly, light enough to
keep bruises & oil at bay, firm enough to bring it
down in a low arc, nadir, up in high arc, apogee,
as the red, wet mouth opens to catch the prize,
a triumph of the tongue, all muscle & mobility.
Olives & sea soil, images & arcs, lips & tongues in
constant caress, continue the slow turn of machinery
down deep in genetic twists, to bare at harvest,
hope, like the hope high in the top branches of
the tree, hope in the pruned burning afterwards.
The lungs swell with salt air & green perfume,
a proud & satisfying moment, recorded or not, yet,
as morsels & moisture descend the throat, descend
pixelated avenues of remembering, a thirst manifests,
unsatisfied. Like faith, olives keep some of their secrets.
Black Opal Koan
A black opal holds the cards, slowly revealed
to be fog of the hand, witnesses before a judge,
stone-dark chants, verdicts from crowds. This
tired & tiresome trouble, we can & will survive it.
Winter, arm trap-caught. Spring, limb broad-axe
severed. For life, run to the city. No hawks soar
over towers. Amid highways, fingers in bark chips
grow roots, the hand blooms in survival, in art.
Notes: Such is the chemistry of position, truth
changes, not with time, but with proximity.
After you visit, I am left little, save music, vertigo,
strain to get out of the deep, the deep what-was.
I may wait too long for the fog to lift. Too quiet,
too careful, too long, too wrong so far, yet still
on my shoulders, I bear, today toward tomorrow,
ancient promises of fruit & another sunrise.
Eugene Stevenson
Eugene Stevenson, son of immigrants, father of expatriates, lives in the Smoky Mountains of North Carolina. Eisenhower Fellow, Pushcart Prize nominee & author of The Population of Dreams (Finishing Line Press 2022), his poems have appeared in The Galway Review, The Hudson Review, San Pedro River Review, Third Wednesday, Tipton Poetry Journal, & Washington Square Review among others.
January 2023 | poetry
A direct hit this time.
Like a Halley’s Comet
coming in 1960 and going out now.
Twain would be proud of the old girl
made of cypress
impervious to nails.
But the river is deadly up
to a line taller than God.
The shallows breathe heavy
stripping palm trees.
The windows are all blown-out
blinds they unfurl to a sky submerged
where gulf water joins
up into the air like being
freed at last
like forever
like gone.
Ward Abel
Ward Abel’s work has appeared in hundreds of journals (Rattle, Versal, The Reader, Worcester Review, Riverbed Review, others), including a nomination for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, and he is the author of three full collections and ten chapbooks of poetry, including his latest collection, “The Width of Here” (Silver Bow, 2021). He is a reformed lawyer, he writes and plays music, and he teaches literature. Abel resides in rural Georgia.
