July 2022 | poetry
Vincent Thomas Bridge, San Pedro Harbor, CA
The green bridge is a weighty suspension
of disbelief,
its angle of ascent firing my muscles,
a forced march in country
shadowing my climb up its short suspenders.
Hands heavy on the rotund rail,
its pitted touch flashes a pier railing,
my father demonstrating baiting a hook,
the wriggling body dangling over the side.
Night pulls up its blanket
veiling the wind-stropped containers
stacked like toy blocks below
while nestled in the standing army of alien cranes
a decommissioned battleship sleeps.
The watery bay beckons.
Below a siren wails to climb the rail.
Roger Camp
Roger Camp lives in Seal Beach, CA where he tends his orchids, walks the pier, plays blues piano and spends afternoons with his pal, Harry, over drinks at Saint & 2nd. When he’s not at home, he’s traveling in the Old World. His work has appeared in Tinderbox Poetry Journal, North American Review, Gulf Coast, Southern Poetry Review and Nimrod.
July 2022 | poetry
Even during class, my sister
strummed chords, fingers
caressing frets or stretching
strings bleeding the blues.
Sometimes she’d pick
a country tune, wailing for lost
beers and pickup trucks,
mourning every orphan.
Now her fingers pluck
bibs and diapers
from laundry, her kids
a Greek chorus of woes
and triumphs. The guitar resonates
during birthdays
or under a beer tent.
My brother-in-law puzzles
at her frustrations. After beers
one night, he confessed
she hums in her sleep,
and taps her finger.
It’s weird, he tells me: sometimes
her hand finds a rhythm, as if
stroking our last dog’s head.
John Cullen
John Cullen graduated from SUNY Geneseo and worked in the entertainment business booking rock bands, a clown troupe, and an R-rated magician. Currently he teaches at Ferris State University and has had work published in American Journal of Poetry, The MacGuffin, Harpur Palate, North Dakota Quarterly and other journals. His chapbook, TOWN CRAZY, is available from Slipstream Press.
July 2022 | poetry
They know before we do,
the birds. In the yard,
feeders swing on their chains.
If you think we don’t bury
our cash in the thaw
of the dark dicey frostbite,
you’re wrong. Trust God
or no one, I urge my husband.
Do not answer the door.
I pour vodka down his throat,
call through the cracks
to bring back the warblers.
Bird bird bird, where is your,
when will it, why why why.
What jumps faster
than blood from a vein?
If you think we don’t practice
the dash to the bunker,
you’re wrong. We’ve run out
of drugs and honey,
but we cannot run far,
railcars packed with
no more time. Before
the siren glass shatter,
we walked fine,
and the mistle thrush
spilled operettas
over the sunflowers.
The neighbors are hiding
their children in attics.
The absence of silvery
wings. Do it now,
begs my husband, break
the thermometer, inject me
with mercury, hollow
my bones before lark
and nightingale swallow
each other’s songs.
Jenny Hubbard
A former high-school English teacher, Jenny Hubbard writes full-time in her hometown of Salisbury, NC. Her work has been published over the years in various journals, including Hunger Mountain, Crab Orchard Review, Tar River Poetry, Nine Mile, Maryland Literary Review, and The Southern Poetry Anthology. Both of Jenny’s novels, And We Stay and Paper Covers Rock, have earned major awards from the American Library Association. Represented by Jonathan Lyons of Curtis Brown, Ltd., Jenny is currently under contract with Penguin Random House.
July 2022 | poetry
I was born under a fish-scaled star, a scar in my aunt’s
brother’s father’s eye. Is this a bone I see, or ash dust
inherited, a silent twin inhabiting my ventricles?
The prima-donna sky preens, sends us lightning sprites
red and too quick to capture. I was walking. I was a whole
lot of broken, and snap, there goes my ankle. The moss
spoke of spring-like January, but the camera didn’t
hit the deep-rutted trail, held close to my heart. My
mornings are voluptuous, my miscalculations disguised
as happy accidents. I believe in my grandfather’s third
kidney, the way he lived through the work of shifting
one pile of stones to another corner of the barbed
and electrified yard, and back again until the sirens sounded
the end of light. Today I discovered a new species
of beetle, a bee who loved my shirt and wouldn’t leave.
The wind issuing from god’s mouth was warm. The wind
issuing from god’s mouth chilled me to the bone. The grass
was god’s also, and Matisse’s cat dreamt of Marianne
Moore with crooked wings. The moon is in umbra, the moon
is menopausal, and time makes less sense than it did
five seconds ago. I will haunt the stars I can’t touch
right now. Every turtle galaxy, every swan-booted nebula
now my problems have been all but solved. I put my nose
to the sweet pea, to the whetstone, and learned something
of the extermination of the human race. I pray my father’s
father’s sisters, who flew through the chimneys, knit
their souls back into body when the stars call us away from here.
Ronda Piszk Broatch
Ronda Piszk Broatch is the author of Lake of Fallen Constellations, (MoonPath Press). She is the recipient of an Artist Trust GAP Grant. Ronda’s journal publications include Fugue, Blackbird, 2River, Sycamore Review, Missouri Review, Palette Poetry, and NPR News / KUOW’s All Things Considered. She is a graduate student working toward her MFA at Pacific Lutheran University’s Rainier Writing Workshop.
July 2022 | poetry
yesterday was no sun
anywhere but everywhere I can’t
know only my ken my neighborhood
my house of cats and cashmere
pickled by moths
the little I see—
I can count the walls
and know I exist
but the sun never
asks about itself it is not a god
who depends on its people
not all seeing
objects are created equal
every day my skin
sees more than I do even muffled
in clothes its cameras see eye to eye
with the cat’s toes
my wet flesh envelope
posts itself on dog walks and sky chases
in city parks
I can’t vouch for you
my deep wide body you know more
than I do
What are you cooking in there
what conversation are you having
with the sun?
I tell your knuckles
to unbunch yet there you go
spending your skin on everyone
Mary Buchinger
Mary Buchinger is the author of five collections of poetry, including / klaʊdz / (Lily Poetry Review Books, 2021), e i n f ü h l u n g/in feeling (Main Street Rag, 2018), Aerialist (Gold Wake, 2015), and Navigating the Reach (Salmon Poetry, forthcoming). Her work has appeared in AGNI, Boston Globe, DIAGRAM, Gargoyle, Massachusetts Review, PANK, phoebe, Plume, Salamander, Queen Mob’s Teahouse, and elsewhere. She is president of the New England Poetry Club and professor of English and communication studies at MCPHS University in Boston. Website: www.marybuchinger.com.
July 2022 | poetry
Vomiting against the wind, hungover sacrosanct,
presenting itself through a badge of honour,
traipsing through the streets, a homely sight,
more surprises championed against growing up
sympathised through another disposition.
This goodly act, slighting for better entertainment,
what happens upstairs stays there, coffee aside,
working through swathes of imperfect manuscripts,
more worse then the other, never fathoming distance
infinite drafts slipping under scrutiny of same.
Close proximity, proposed even more attractive,
a steady kiss prolongs the desperate situation
being pawed for good measure, regretting at leisure
Hitting through secret apertures waiting for use
wanting what’s not on the table, a desire abdicated.
Watching from below, a closeted cry still heard
oscillating through indifference and agony,
monumental trademark as ubiquitous as the trees
lights not going out, under cover of alcohol,
solid flowers in lieu of half-arsed apologies.
No context for that smile, private jokes abiding,
grimacing from one’s own a fault worth permitting,
loved within measure still not enough,
infinite coffee, refills, riches worth pursuing
not uglified by persuasion, desired through want.
Patricia Walsh
Patricia Walsh was born and raised in the parish of Mourneabbey, Co Cork, Ireland. To date, she has published one novel, titled The Quest for Lost Eire, in 2014, and has published one collection of poetry, titled “Continuity Errors,” with Lapwing Publications in 2010. She has since been published in a variety of print and online journals. These include: The Lake; Seventh Quarry Press; Marble Journal; New Binary Press; Stanzas; Crossways; Ygdrasil; Seventh Quarry; The Fractured Nuance; Revival Magazine; Ink Sweat and Tears; Drunk Monkeys; Hesterglock Press; Linnet’s Wing, Narrator International, The Galway Review; Poethead and The Evening Echo. She has also published a novel, In The Days of Ford Cortina, in August 2021.
