January 2022 | poetry
While I was a girl waiting for life
to improve I did what I could, a ladybug
on her back kicking her feet in the air.
Dreaming of flight, I discovered
my mother’s hoarded stamps, unused
hodgepodge of American hope:
Skylab, Credos of the Founding Fathers,
Paul Lawrence Dunbar, Exploring the Moon,
Coral Reefs, Emily Dickinson, Collective Bargaining,
Energy Conservation, Robert Frost,
Indian Art, Osteopathic Medicine, Peace Corps,
Apollo-Soyuz, Save Our Water, Peter Max’s
Preserve the Environment, Robert Indiana’s
Love, which was all we needed, e pluribus unum
entreaties to the common good.
Doing what she never would, I organized
each intaglio prayer into an album, protected
by the verdigris majesty of our Lady of Liberty,
the infinite halftone dots within painting
a bigger picture to show me how
my pattern of spots might one day fit.
Broadening, I started to write the world,
sending scarce singles via post for stamps
on approval, something I could do while grounded.
Each month, the universe was delivered:
glassine envelopes opening like blurry windows to full-color
propaganda from the Soviet Bloc and African dictatorships,
perforated portraits of the unknown: Burundi.
Bulgaria, Equatorial Guinea, Fujeira.
The Maldive Islands. Tonga.
Some countries even marketed to the likes of me:
a 3-D moon landing from Ajman, scented flowers
from Bhutan, a peel-off diamond from Sierra Leone.
I could select scenes of the Montreal Olympics,
Japanese landscapes, cat breeds, Mickey Mouse,
gemstones, creatures of the African savannah.
Such power even a 10-year-old had
in her nascent geekery, to buy or reject,
the limited locus of my choices in those years.
I licked countless translucent hinges, fixing
them to sheets in my Ambassador Album,
“For Stamps of the World—Personally Designed by H.E. Harris.”
Providing brief colonialist histories for each country,
a world map on the plasticized back cover,
Mr. Harris taught me all I knew of the planet,
preparing me for when I would no longer be stranded.
He gave my curiosity structure while my mother slept
and shouted her nightmares.
Other children practiced scales or played Little League
for parents shaping their lives like sculptors. With my postage paid,
I carefully opened each colorful window and escaped
into the beguiling worlds then closed to me: page after page
of my meticulously ordered ambition, plans
for how I would right myself and fly away.
Lori Rottenberg
Lori Rottenberg is a poet who lives in Arlington, Virginia. She has published in such journals as The Dewdrop, Artemis, Potomac Review, and Poetica, and in anthologies by Paycock Press, Telling Our Stories Press, and Chuffed Buff Books. She has a series of six poems to be published by UCityReview in June 2022 and another poem to be published in December 2021 in The Moving Force Journal. One of her poems was picked for the 2021 Arlington Moving Words competition and appeared on county buses this spring. She has served as a visiting poet in the Arlington Public Schools Pick-a-Poet program since 2007, was an invited poet in the Joaquin Miller Cabin Reading Series in 2002, was a finalist in the 2006 Arlington Reads Poetry Competition, and was a recipient of Best Published Award in the March 2009 issue of Poetica. She is currently a writing instructor for international students at George Mason University and is in her second year of studies at the George Mason University MFA Poetry program.
January 2022 | poetry
The way clouds seep through in wings
Fringe of shadow After summer Fall camouflage
I see me
Outside a window looking in
My first baby
Sam the dog
Trusting Wandering
Snow Ice Branches littered Trees
From storms Bowed
I see snowmen and snow angels One more child
Packed in a snowsuit Dad on skates
Burning trash Sitting with a beer
On a summer night
My mother kneels
offers her flowers to bees Waits
One second
Another needy plant
Calls her eye
Small flutter Leaves
Petals rise light Hallowed breaths
I see the wooden man
Whirligig White canoe Saw cut
Feathers Slipped halo
He rides lopsided
Above my mother’s garden
Like a wing
One lone paddle
Lifts the sky
Sheryl L. White
Sheryl L. White is an artist and writer living in Boston. Her writing has been published in The Comstock Review, Solstice Literary Magazine, Poetry Quarterly, The Boston Globe, Split Rock Review, Great Lakes Review, The Woven Tale Press Journal, The Roanoke Review, among others. She was a recipient of a Massachusetts Cultural Council Poetry Finalist Grant and was twice selected for the Mayor of Boston Poetry Program. In 2019, she was a Pushcart nominee and in 2021, a Best of the Net Nominee. Her chapbook, Sky gone, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2020.
January 2022 | poetry
The sun had already vanished behind
the lights, while we were busy arguing over
a meal gone wrong. I turn to the sea
after the goodbyes with no handshakes or
kisses. The bins aren’t empty yet, of
the plastic bottles and spoons, paper cups,
sandwich wraps, and other unnamable
stuff. A lone seagull hovers above, but I’m
the least bit worried. An artist, with a
fast-burning cigarette in his mouth, carries
his unsold paintings – ‘Jesus and Uncle
Mephisto on a Fishing Trip’, ‘Amy
Winehouse’s Inward Gaze’, ‘Self-Portrait of
a Frog as an Artist’ and so on – back
to the store that’s going to be his studio at
night. There’s a man persuading
a reluctant dog on a leash to get back home,
to end its inane engagement with
a piece of dirtied cloth that looks like
a headscarf that must’ve flown off
too far from someone who might not have
bothered to get it back, or to cover
their head again. I let the dialogues, tones,
gestures, omission of words, choice
of food, and length of sighs from my recent
memories lap against a receding
conscience. They froth over the signs, soon
to be washed off like footprints on
the sand; the very same signs that’d pushed
me to this vast emptiness where a stale
breeze caresses me, amidst what’s lost, torn
apart, stolen, relinquished, or thrown
away for no reason, to the smug black bins.
Jose Varghese
Jose Varghese is an Indian author who has worked as an English teacher in colleges and universities in India and the Middle East. He is the author of ‘Silver Painted Gandhi and Other Poems’ and his short story manuscript ‘In/Sane’ was a finalist in the 2018 Beverly International Prize. He was a finalist twice in the London Independent Story Prize (LISP), a runner-up in the Salt Prize, and was commended in the Gregory O’Donoghue International Poetry Prize. His works are published in Litro, Joao Roque Literary Journal, Haunted Waters Press, Tempered Runes Press, Cathexis Northwest Press, Beyond Words Literary Magazine, The Best Asian Short Story Anthology (2019 and 2021), The Best Asian Poetry Anthology (2021), Dreich, Live Encounters, Meridian – The APWT Drunken Boat Anthology, Unthology 5, Unveiled, Reflex Fiction, Faber QuickFic, and Flash Fiction Magazine.
January 2022 | poetry
took a shortcut through Central Park, stopping briefly for brunch
at the old sheepfold aka Tavern on the Green. (Ever hard to please
New Yorkers prefer Cavern on the Green). Well pleased he was
with the new menu from which he sampled the warm squid salad,
followed by a small plate of Cremini mushrooms with Cabrales cheese
and red chili. Since he was nearby, and the museums beckoned
he returned their calling there to hang from lights and ponder
the Phillips Collection, most especially the Rothko Room. Once more
filled with awe, the bat out of Hell set sail for the Guggenheim’s
Twombly collection. His favorite palate chaser after the quiet room.
No one expects a bat, one on a day-pass from Hell, to be out
during the day, much less face to face, with canvas and frame, although
some find the orange tinted sunglasses off-putting and over the top,
even for a bat out of Hell. As a card-carrying Patron level member,
he is entitled as such to see what can be seen, and often more.
Richard Weaver
The author hopes to one day once again volunteer with the Maryland Book Bank, CityLit, the Baltimore Book Festival, and return as writer-in-residence at the James Joyce Pub. His pubs: North American Review, crazyhorse, New England Review, Southern Quarterly, Loch Raven Review, & Poetry Magazine. He’s the author of The Stars Undone (Duende Press, 1992), and provided the libretto for a symphony, Of Sea and Stars (2005), performed 4 times to date. Recently his 135th {Ir}Rational Narrative, aka prose poem, was published. He was one of the founders and PEd of the Black Warrior Review.
January 2022 | poetry
Scientists find strange black ‘superionic ice’ that could exist inside
other planets – Argonne National Laboratory, 10/28/21
Water, vapor, ice – glass
half full, steam from the kettle,
frost on the windshield
I thought I knew what
I needed to know about
water’s phases
But now scientists crush water
between two diamonds and heat it
with a laser
It makes weird, hot, black ice
they say, and there’s lots
of it in the universe
Maybe it’s how icy planets form
Maybe it shows how much
we’re still learning, how much
we still have to learn
And if there’s more to know
about water, just think of earth,
air, and fire
Sally Zakariya
Sally Zakariya’s poetry has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Her publications include Something Like a Life, Muslim Wife, The Unknowable Mystery of Other People, Personal Astronomy, and When You Escape. She edited a poetry anthology, Joys of the Table, and blogs at www.butdoesitrhyme.com.
January 2022 | poetry
This time, I will begin at the ending.
That house burned in the fire
along with all of the others
in Larkin Valley.
But by then, the bats were gone.
I keep returning to this poem
that draws me to a late autumn afternoon
when my niece and I sat in lawn chairs
facing her house. Just after sunset,
a dark shape appeared
from a crack under the eves,
grew larger and left
on its jerky flight.
Then came another
dark shape
and another until
the bats had all flown out.
We pulled on our sweatshirts,
poured white wine
and waited for the stars
to begin their display.
Patricia L. Scruggs
Patricia L. Scruggs lives and writes in Southern California. In addition to her poetry collection, Forget the Moon, her work has appeared in ONTHEBUS, Spillway, RATTLE, Calyx, Cultural Weekly, Crab Creek Review, Lummox, Inlandia as well as the anthologies 13 Los Angeles Poets, So Luminous the Wildflowers, and Beyond the Lyric Moment. A recent Pushcart Prize nominee, Patricia is a retired art educator who earned her MFA at California State University, Fullerton.
