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.
July 2022 | poetry
I believe that if you rub the forehead
of a captured crow clockwise
in small circles, it will gift you
with the knack of comprehension
teach you to understand the cawing
conversations of its cousins, those
who’ve roosted darkly in the maples,
and now are waking up the day.
I heard the congregation, all
the crows’ brash chattering above
the morning mist rising from the river
still lavender with hope.
I am dubious, although I’d like to trust
that this bright river rattling through the gorge
will come soon to a shallow peace, flash
its stony gifts, glinting catch-eyes for the crows.
Beth Spencer
Beth Spencer currently lives near Minneapolis, MN, loves travel, and is a notable example of the persistence of hope over experience. She has been messing about with poetry since fifth grade when she won a “Why I Like to Read Good Books” contest by submitting her essay in poem form.
July 2022 | poetry
Bloodied chrysanthemums envelop
The blurred lines of the paint-strewn floor
Casting shadows in the midst
Of broken light, fragmented scenes
Memories unended, just started
The gleaming red exit sign
In the back
Hurts my eyes; I was told
That the church was a safe place
Somehow, it makes me feel
Empty.
Conjoined benches
Of wispy outlines, ghosts whose
Hourglasses broke too early
Used to hold gold, left dust
In their goodbyes
Silence pursues
Every so often disrupted
By whispers of white lies
That reflect off the silk-covered altar
Losing their voice
To the slightest breath of wind
I once saw a garden outside the bounds
Of these wood-shaven walls
Ruby-dipped roses
Once I turned my head
They were gone
Maybe I hold on to things
That aren’t meant for me
Hannah Zhang
Hannah Zhang is a 16-year-old aspiring writer from Tucson, Arizona. She enjoys reading all kinds of novels, leaning towards adventure and fantasy. Inspired by the beauty of nature, she frequently incorporates it into her stories and poems. She has been writing since a young age and sees it as an outlet to express herself. She hopes that her writing can inspire readers to appreciate the beauty of life and the world we live in. Hannah’s work has been recognized at the Scholastic Arts and Writing Competition and published in Girls Right The World, The Weight Journal, TeenWritersProject Quarterly Lit Zine magazine, Cathartic Literary Magazine, Journal of Undiscovered Poet (forthcoming), Idle Ink and Eternal Haunted Summer.
July 2022 | poetry
“. . . until someone finds you / something else to do.”
Leonard Cohen
The anchor is a victim
no more than the dripping oars
or the lines made taut
by soft lead sinkers.
The anchor is not a poem
but a guide with sand in its eyes
and a hook too big and blunt
for any mouth.
The anchor is a contract
not of glory but of patience
between surfaces and hours,
flashing lure and fading light.
The anchor is a prayer for the father and son
and for the boat kneeling before the reeds
as it reaches for each shore
carrying its own lake and a coiled rope.
Jeffrey Thompson
Jeffrey Thompson was raised in Fargo, North Dakota, and educated at the University of Iowa and Cornell Law School. He lives in Phoenix, Arizona, where he practices public interest law. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Neologism Poetry Journal, North Dakota Quarterly, The Main Street Rag, Passengers Journal, Tipton Poetry Journal, The Tusculum Review, FERAL, and Unbroken. His hobbies include reading, hiking, and photography.
July 2022 | poetry
[28401 – 28500]
“What sclerotic bibliomaniac,
coincidental with his psychologist,
bussed in these upflung glossaries & down-
loaded them to the icebox?” abridges
a crapulous Nigerian who yaws
again to sidestep a hyperbolic
Swazi cannonball. (That was touch-&-go.)
What a worrier! What a temerarious
ranter! (Here he yorks in order to toughen
his sphincter.) What a miniscule klepto-
maniac! “Must they all, on a bender
of mayhem & abomination, gimp
at the bloodroot of organizational
racism, interacting only to
revitalize their blurry egos?”
[28601 – 28700]
Now, at mid-May in Trapani, plangent
stickleback, with scalene asymmetry,
sheave the seaway in free-for-all bonding
& fusiform interrelation. Was it
Polyhymnia that gelt Castrato?
Does dialog desktop shareware outrank
the monochromatic brume of all this
iconography? Was it wrongheaded
accountancy or simply numismatics
that overlie the Oslo Olympics?
Would’ve anything kept the pterodactyl
from the piglets? Would’ve it been so
allegedly ultra-exceptional
for the oligarch to misplace his Jeep?
[23601 – 23700]
One AM in the insectivorous
Maldives where busybodies dismantle
their esculent lingerie glumly
& etymologically, yet uncontested.
Ah, cohabitation. . . . Crap! A matchlock!
Pappy, oh Pappy! A motorcycle
advertises such vulgarism &
wastage while hare-brained tom-tom outbid them,
nog upon nog, & coagulation
of the Eucharist actuates
zodiacal, agnostic sciatica.
For colophon, the bravura, baroque
nocturne of a fledgling saleswoman:
Best to lacerate then sprint away.
[23901 – 24000]
Relight the astrolabe fey Netherlander,
for I’m conflicted. Though I peddle my
unheroic tricycle, all godspeed
& weirdness, at evensong a bullfinch
deadens the seamless margrave with saltpeter.
Relight the handspike, for this nerve-racking
snapshot is mushy & insubstantial
as a puree of bumptious Newtonian
transcendentalism. Mime on moony
stammerer. Relight the ovule, gullible
ventriloquist, & outflank the buttock of
coronary morbidity: for screed
is pottle to the teetotaler, as
instrumentation is prophylactic
to the wolverine.
[33001 – 33100]
Pocked with paintwork, Lulu mighta been
moonlighting. No tomboyish shogun, but
no sadist, either, she was as left-wing
& luminescent as the Erinyes
on the freeway. She could scam a Rodin
out of a hexahedron. She mighta
been a godforsaken luddite, but her
mega-wonky weathervane, as much as
her hedonic headwind, was undepraved.
We getup to publicize the “gotcha”
lovage of salami knackers &
overplay the Maharashtra back in
Muskogee. What mighta been! Instead we’re
goners for gimlet-eyed ophthalmology.
Peter J. Grieco
Peter J. Grieco is a retired English professor and former school bus driver. His poems are widely published in small magazines on-line and in print. His blog “At the Musarium and Other Writings” [https://pjgrieco.wordpress.com/] archives much of this work. His chapbook collection of ekphrastic verse, “The Bind Man’s Meal,” is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press.
