October 2022 | poetry
Downpour pelts windows, rakes roof
like shards hurled in menace.
The torrent brakes slowly, as though coaxed to relent.
A respite that cradles seeds of relief that will soon
vanish, Scott thinks as he zooms in on a cardinal’s
cautious dip in a puddle beyond its sheltered nest.
Choice lies in the space between frames.
Focus to see it, or miss it & get carved by tides.
Worse yet, see it and stand struck, a piano key stuck
unhinged from resonance. Scott once found consonance
with Steph under a willow tree, a refuge from raindrops
that soaked their skin as sunlight dappled through
storm clouds. Creeping myrtle carpeted ground where
he went down on one knee, weather be damned.
He’d still make that choice after seeing
the frames that followed: currents that surged
and swept them in their wake. Adrift, he crops
the cardinal shot, softens shadows until
its color pops, stashes it amid thousands of
moments frozen in time, sketches on fogged glass
stiffened into stone. Steph murmurs, voice barely
a whimper since her last chemo. He
lets go
of his camera, its lens
powerless before a butterfly’s floundering flutter.
V.A. Bettencourt
A. Bettencourt writes poetry and flash fiction. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Magma Poetry, The American Journal of Poetry, and Willows Wept Review, among others.
October 2022 | poetry
1.
With boulders, or another substance that can’t burn, I’ll build a barn,
buy Nigerian goats to bounce with favored popcorn sheep.
Animals kicking bare bone as wildfire steams a skyline.
2.
Goatee on my chin, the soul of California is burning like a lung.
I’m goat eye, horizontal, confusing as three pupils,
a shag of helpless, readying to die in the coming singe.
3.
I don’t eat meat from a table though mouths I love
water at the char of curry. Sweet strings of shoulder,
a chew of God meat in the cheek of a funky heaven.
Robert Carr
Robert Carr is the author of Amaranth, published in 2016 by Indolent Books and The Unbuttoned Eye, a full-length 2019 collection from 3: A Taos Press. Among other publications his poetry appears in Crab Orchard Review, Lana Turner Journal, the Maine Review, the Massachusetts Review and Shenandoah. Selected by the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance, he is the recipient of a 2022 artist residency at Monson Arts. Additional information can be found at robertcarr.org
October 2022 | poetry
I’m standing on my head and typing with my toes
because this is for you,
So …
Who’s going to sell those autographs-of-jesus?
Who’s going to snort Beethoven to the clouds?
Who will anoint our hearth with Velveeta?
And who will love me like Livin’ Is A Breeze?
In-furigated,
re-pooperated,
beanie-brained as we pleased,
it was easy to be in love
when livin’ was a breeze.
“Let’s take our feet with us wherever we go”
Ok. And keep them safe inside our shoes
(but if a puppy sucks on our toes, that’s ok, too).
Then we’ll run down rabbits on the way to our soul,
ask the wind which way to go,
then finally, we’ll know how sad we can be:
Making love,
we couldn’t help but press your dying into me;
couldn’t help but want
my life for you.
Gary Lee Barkow practices Tai Chi and walks around feeling loved. He keeps a flashlight by his futon in case he has a brilliant idea at night. He doesn’t know where poetry comes from, so he enjoys the mystery. He likes: Mathematics, aeroplanes with propellers, earthworms, the San Francisco 49ers and rock ‘n’ roll.
October 2022 | poetry
Annotated Patpong Love Song
Verse 1
Her belly’s as big
though she’s only
half his size
Pint-sized really, she’d be his daughter if she weren’t his concubine, his squeeze,
his number really, that is, he picked the number pinned on her bikini while she tumbled
in the neon marsh waters of the Mermaidium.
Verse 2
Wide-eyed calf who strayed,
her stick legs split like fragrant timber.
The old man had his way.
They had sex that he paid for not always in cash, but with a Moschino knock-off handbag, or
Day-Glo Japanese sneakers or increasingly doctor-money to her family up north in Udon Thani,
so much money for gout and nose bleeds and non-specific idiopathic pain that he started to
question how one woman – her mother – could get sick sick/so quick quick.
Verse 3
And now he glows
with foolish pride
as two bellies grow
side by side.
She offered her virtue for a transaction so now she’ll trade her freedom for security,
and keep the baby and become his wife even though he was really fat and made no effort
to contain his chronic flatulence due to the Heineken drip-feed from breakfast onwards. One
other thing: she could not pronounce her new last name. Dutch…Polish…whatever.
The Wild Blue Horses
Long before techno hit Berlin, Franz Marc miffed
the fussbudget bean counters of the Kaiser Reich
by painting blue horses stampeding from the yard,
horses romping like wedding guests on wooded trails
swigging schnapps from the bottle under the yellowest of moons.
But when the war came, Franz bled out on a cratered, treeless plain.
And, his blue horses vanished in the boneyard air.
The Kaiser, it was later learned, had given all notable artists
permission to withdraw. But the order did not arrive in time.
This was not Saving Private Ryan.
It was a very German movie.
Stefan Sullivan
Stefan Sullivan is the author of a memoir set in Siberian oil country (Die Andere Bibliothek/Frankfurt) and a work in philosophy (Marx for a Post-Communist Era: On Poverty, Corruption and Banality (Routledge/London). He has also given over 300 performances as a lounge singer/pianist. He lives in Washington DC.
October 2022 | poetry
Stolen Gum
She has so much gum.
I have none.
Pained by my lack,
I count thirteen sticks
in that pink
Extra pack:
shiny foil tips make my
fingers twitch. I
skirt temptation, chasing
through the kitchen, trailing
tutus—to outside,
seeking freedom:
Spear Stream,
trampoline,
garden packed with crisp
green beans. But I dash
back, snatch that fat
pack. One touch
and I taste relief. Above,
the Elvis clock waggles
his hips. The King
feels my need. And only he
sees me slip:
just one silver stick.
Silly girl,
you think you’re hiding
your hand, hiding
that gum, running
to the bathroom, first,
then feigning
thirst. You return
from my kitchen,
refreshed. But when
you roll close to me
on the trampoline,
your whispers smell
sweet:
not the yellow-egg sulphur
of my water,
no bold whiff of our
garlicky lunch. Nor can
crabapple season,
weeks away, account
for that cloying
bubblegum scent
on your breath.
Two decades on, as I drag
myself up
to Step Nine,
into the blinding shine
of Rigorous Honesty,
I see Caitlin’s
pink-cheeked face,
that stolen gum,
first. Why this small thing,
before uglier indiscretions:
lying through my teeth
driving only while drinking
selling coke to children
selling my soul for love
from coast to coast?
Perhaps Elvis, in his eternal
temporal wisdom, hinted
at what was to come:
me, holding drink, pipe, life
in my shaking hand,
already tasting the burn
in my throat?
Fire in the Hole
I hear the Jeep before I smell it.
I smell exhaust before I see it.
Before he sees me—before I know it—
I’m horizontal, ducking low
down below the windshield sight line,
one knee on the seat, the other
leg outstretched, just hidden
behind the unfurled wing of driver door.
I can almost taste the scratched leather on my gearshift
before the rising tide of fear catches in my throat,
creeps up my windpipe,
tugs at my tonsils,
trauma souring taste buds on the back of my tongue.
Even the tang of fresh-cut grass is no match
for this metallic panic the sound
of an old engine unfurls in me—
and only in this place. My mother’s house.
Her lawn. Her gardens.
Her perfect front porch
with its worn boards, grooved from years of zealous sweeping.
Where neither the eternal pack of dogs,
nor my mother’s love,
nor my own malignant bravado
could keep me safe.
Quincy Gray McMichael
When not at her writing desk, Quincy Gray McMichael stewards her farm, Vernal Vibe Rise, on Moneton ancestral land. Her writing—both creative nonfiction and poetry—has been published in Yes! Magazine, The Dewdrop, Open: A Journal of Arts and Letters, Greenbrier Valley Quarterly, and is forthcoming from Appalachian Review and Assay, among other publications. Quincy holds an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from the Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Writing at Spalding University. She is a Contributing Editor at Good River Review and is completing a hybrid memoir that explores obsession and overwork through a blend of poetry and prose.
July 2022 | poetry
The old man tells me, “If I didn’t have my thousand acres,
I would die.” He doesn’t realize he is in the hospital
emergency waiting room. “If I didn’t have my wife,
I would die.” He looks at me sincerely, clearly unaware
of the situation at hand, his hand trembling
on the arm of his wheelchair. “She’s at home
making supper for the hired help, you know,
when they come back from driving cows to pasture.”
But he hasn’t had cattle for over thirty years,
and his acreage now only exists framed in pictures
in his small room at the nursing home where his wife
also was full of life before she died five years ago.
I know because the man’s caretaker told me
when she wheeled him in to wait, just in case
he needed to say goodbye to his daughter
rushed in by ambulance an hour before.
Aware the woman’s heart attack was massive,
I casually ask if he has any children. He hesitates,
tries to remember, then settles, “No, I don’t think so,
but if I did and anything happened to them, I would die.”
Yvette A. Schnoeker-Shorb
Yvette A. Schnoeker-Shorb is the author of the chapbook, Shapes That Stay (Kelsay Books, 2021). Her poetry has appeared in The Midwest Quarterly, Weber: The Contemporary West, About Place Journal, High Desert Journal, Clockhouse, AJN: The American Journal of Nursing, Terrain.org, and many other journals. She holds an interdisciplinary MA and has served in various capacities as an educator, a researcher, and an editor.
