January 2023 | poetry
Things I Missed
I was never alone with an abalone;
I never swallowed a spoon whole.
My parents never made love in front of me-
I’m not sure if they ever made love at all.
I was a fruit not ripe yet,
but born anyway.
The allure of dogs was lost on me;
I never understood the beauty of lamps.
They took up so much space,
and I wanted to push them off tables.
I never had a brother who went to war.
There was a casualty from Viet Nam
whose shaving lotion nipped at my senses;
we ate white rice flavored with oregano
and listened to Janis Joplin a lot.
The night we saw a Genet play
was the only time I heard him cry.
My friend Sue was sleeping on a cot next to us at the time.
She rested lightly, curious and unruffled;
I didn’t say goodbye to him properly.
I demanded instead that he return my albums, which he did.
I don’t remember where he went after the hospital.
Letter To the Twenty-first Century
I’m yours, I guess.
You’re not polite.
You want me online all day,
thin and lonely.
You say, hush, pretend you’re not in chains.
You say, look up at the stars,
never look down.
The old me’s going to start running,
the old me is bending and breaking,
shaking and making a stand.
I tell my beloved
don’t be reborn yet-
you wouldn’t be happy here.
The snow starts melting
as soon as it falls.
Mary McGinnis
Mary McGinnis, blind since birth, has been writing and living in New Mexico since 1972 where life has inspired her with emptiness, desert, and mountains. Published in over 80 magazines and anthologies including Lummox IX, BombFireLit, and Fixed and Free Anthology, she has also been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and included in the Telepoetry series recordings. She has published three full length collections: Listening for Cactus (1996), October Again (2008), See with Your Whole Body (2016), and a chapbook, “Breath of Willow.”
January 2023 | poetry
the Waddington quins
died on delivery ~
their shared placenta
burned by local custom ~
their bodies sent to Dr Hunter
as medical specimens
pallid flaccid ghostly
water-babies hang in a tank
suspended
in solution
skin ridged like hands
left too long in bath water
liquor-steeped foetuses
with sightless eyes mere hooded slits
ribs protruding wraith limbs dangling
a chorus
of stringless
marionettes
wailing mouths gape
in soundless distress waiting in vain to hear
their long-dead mother’s heartbeat
Clare Marsh
Clare Marsh, a Kent based international adoption social worker, was awarded M.A. Creative Writing from the University of Kent (2018) and was a Pushcart Prize nominee (2017). She won the 2020 Olga Sinclair Short Story Prize. Her work has been published in Lighthouse, Mslexia, Ink, Sweat and Tears, Acropolis, Places of Poetry, Pure Slush, Green Ink Poetry and Rebel Talk.
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.
