October 2024 | poetry
(for the cashier at Brookline Booksmith who told me Carlo Rovelli was the best author in the whole bookstore, which felt like a stretch although I liked the book.)
I believe
Before Anaximander the world was flat
and ringed by a river called Ocean,
That Copernicus moved the sun literally
pushing earth to its tertiary orbit.
I believe
We were born of four substances, just earth,
fire, air, and water, later to be atomized,
That we could never have wrapped ourselves
in the blanket of space and time before Einstein.
We invent the world,
Rounding its edges when we need the room
to sail our ships, space the stars to grow
the universe.
Steven Goldman
Steven Goldman is a writer and teacher who lives in Boston, Massachusetts. He is the author of two books: the YA novel Two Parties, One Tux, and a Short Film About the Grapes of Wrath and the essay collection Four Square and the Politics of Sixth Grade Lunch. His work has appeared in a number of literary and professional magazines, including The Jewish Literary Journal, Edutopia, and Nimrod.
October 2024 | poetry
In response to Hieronymus Bosch’s The Seven Deadly Sins and the Four Last Things.
If William Tell’s arrow missed
and the child was struck almost clear through the head,
his hat would look like the one on this wall,
crown pierced instead of the apple.
Take that most primal of fruits.
Wedge it into a slaughtered pig’s open mouth.
The cauldron is laughingly small, but somehow a full feast
is laid out—plump chickens, chowder bowls to the brim,
the largest drumstick you can imagine,
and a cavernous jug of wine upturned for one long gulp.
Drink it all down. How could you be blamed
for wanting it now, apt as this world
is to launch arrows at your head,
a mere blink between the quick and dead.
Jennifer LeBlanc
Jennifer LeBlanc earned an MFA in Creative Writing from Lesley University. Her first full-length book, Descent, was published by Finishing Line Press (2020) and was named a Distinguished Favorite in Poetry (2021) by the Independent Press Award. Individual poems have been published or are forthcoming in Consequence, Solstice, Nixes Mate Review, Thimble Literary Magazine, and J Journal. Jennifer is a poetry reader for Kitchen Table Quarterly. She was nominated for a 2013 Pushcart Prize and works at Harvard University.
October 2024 | poetry
Bombed apartments lie open,
windows shattered, spears of
jagged glass, broken teeth
biting into vacancy.
Torn net curtains flap,
wave, signalling into emptiness.
No neighbours to spy on
No secrets to conceal.
In flattened playgrounds
twisted slides, slaughtered serpents,
still emblazoned in blue and yellow.
Swings sway in the freezing wind;
the haunting cry is heard
of dead children’s voices.
In ruined shopping malls
corpses clutch in frozen fingers,
plastic bags of untouched bread.
Cratered roads leave villages
names on maps, virtual destinations,
no more reachable than
Shangri-La or Camelot.
Stray dogs ravage the dead
Loose horses graze
in someone’s garden.
In a bombed-out cottage
an old woman cooks potatoes.
Behind her, two flower-papered walls,
half a cupboard, a china elephant,
the remnants of her bedroom, shown
on the evening news in Paris, New York, Delhi.
The village classroom,
a tangled mess of broken desks,
a single shoe, an open book,
a child’s sketch of a burning tank.
A boy crossing a pock-marked road,
automatically looks for traffic.
A ghostly line of phantom waggons
passes the unburied dead.
Stuck in muddy ditches, tank guns
point skywards at the rising moon.
A bomb explodes, a flash of red,
the dreadful beauty of instant flames.
In London, Washington, Moscow, Beijing,
they roll the dice, again.
Sarah Das Gupta
Sarah Das Gupta is an 82-year-old writer from Cambridge, UK, who has been writing since last year when an accident left her with very limited mobility. Her work has been published in many magazines and anthologies in over 25 countries, from New Zealand to Kazakhstan. This year, she has been nominated for Best of the Net and a Dwarf Star Award.
October 2024 | poetry
FRAMED
…for my father
To love a person with Alzheimer’s is to learn the song
in their heart and sing it to them when they have forgotten.
– Arne Garborg
He spent years in the basement
at war against forgetting.
Scissors and tape were his weapons,
the conflict relentless,
his ability to recall
anything was vanishing.
He cut up hundreds of old photos,
following the lead of his demolished brain.
Anything he believed excess
he cut from the photo-
trees, cars, houses, the sky.
It was the people he was holding on to.
Like the cat pushing his whiskers into
the corners of walls,
my father rubbed against
the corners of his longing,
leaving a vague imprint of his losses,
the stain of the past he was trying to marshal.
Memories he was
not even aware were lost,
had been swept away.
The chosen were taped
somewhere into a cheap frame
he’d buy at the drug store across the street,
until he could no longer remember where it was.
If someone struck a match
in the trashed warehouse of his brain,
that person was cut from a photo
and taped into his new dwelling-
The Frame of the Familiar.
Everyone overlapped-
the newborn, the aged, the dead,
the teens, the young adults…
it made no difference
whether they had known one another or not,
as long as he thought
he might have known them from somewhere,
from some time now omitted.
To finish, he’d find a photo of himself,
the one person he was still sure he knew.
He’d hunt for a place
to tape himself
in this new world, part color,
part black and white, part sepia.
There were giant people, tiny people,
torn people, faded and stained people,
in this multi-colored person-scape
comprising only those folks
he “sort of” “seemed” to recognize,
even MLK, RFK, JFK, Anita Bryant
made it into a frame.
When a frame was completed
he would take it out to his knotty pine porch,
its walls covered with frames,
grab his Black &. Decker
and drill straight through the frame
and into the wall.
Done.
Onto the next.
He had discovered a way to resurrect
some inner joy,
but the imperative was
to tape securely
lest someone get separated
and forget their way back.
He tamed the rough, curled edges
of the old photos with Scotch-tape,
and brought generations together,
a congregation of the living
alongside their ghost kin,
a population of his own design
of faces remembered,
or faces
he thought he remembered.
John L. Stanizzi
John L. Stanizzi is the author of Ecstasy Among Ghosts, Sleepwalking, Dance Against the Wall, After the Bell, Hallelujah Time!, High Tide – Ebb Tide, Four Bits, Chants, Sundowning, POND, The Tree That Lights The Way Home, Feathers and Bones. Viper Brain, and SEE. John’s work has been widely published. Johnnie’s poems can be found in Rattle, Prairie Schooner, Plainsong, The Cortland Review, American Life in Poetry, The New York Quarterly, Paterson Literary Review, Tar River Review, PoetLore, Potomac Review, and many others. His creative nonfiction has been published in Literature and Belief, Stone Coast Review, Ovunque Siamo, East Coast, After the Pause, Adelaide, Impspired, and many others. His poems have appeared widely in Italy with profound gratitude to his translator, and dear friend, Angela D’ambra. John has read at venues all over New England, including the Mystic Arts Café, the Sunken Garden Poetry Festival, Hartford Stage, and many others. He also coordinated the Fresh Voices Poetry Competition for Young Poets at Hill-Stead Museum, Farmington, Connecticut. A “teaching artist” for the national poetry recitation contest, Poetry Out Loud, John spent a decade with Poetry Out Loud. He is a former Wesleyan University Etherington Scholar, a New England Poet of the Year, and Poet-in-Residence at Manchester Community College and in the Middletown Connecticut School District. In 2021, John was the recipient of a Fellowship in Creative Writing – Non-Fiction, granted to him by the Connecticut Office of the Arts, Culture, and Diversity for work on his new memoir, Bless Me, Father, for I Have Sinned. His short CNF piece Pants was named by its publisher, Potato Soup Journal, “Best of 2022.” John taught literature at Manchester Community College in Manchester, Connecticut, for 26 years. He taught high school English and directed the theater program at Bacon Academy in Colchester, CT. for 24 years; Johnnie put up 42 plays in 24 years. Johnnie lives with his wife, Carol, in Coventry, CT.
October 2024 | poetry
I take in a terrific piano concert: classic
ragtime, boogie-woogie, rhumba-boogie
from New Orleans, a couple of blues numbers.
Professor Longhair tribute. A boogie version
of the national anthem; it never sounded better.
The pianist’s fingers blur; from his left hand
the bass rumbles like a train under the street.
Beside him a drummer sits on a box-drum
he beats time on, and
I’m grooving,
moving
my body all over along with the drumbeat;
doing a jitterbug
sitting down.
Big smile all over my face.
Keeping time with every beat. If only
someone else would stand and dance!
The Texas town that I moved here from, lots
of people would have been up and dancing—
in the aisles, down front, at the back, anywhere
there was room. Shouts and whistles
between numbers, hair and feet flying.
This Midwest audience: the woman next to me
wears a cautious smile. A couple behind me
peer studiously at the pianist. A few people
tap feet or joggle their heads. That’s it?
After each number, polite applause.
I’m totally frustrated! And damn!
That curly-haired drummer is so hot
perched there on his cajón
with his twice-pierced ears
and the stud at the side of his nose.
Lynn D. Gilbert
Lynn D. Gilbert’s poems have appeared in Arboreal, Bacopa Literary Review, Blue Unicorn (Pushcart nomination), Consequence, Footnote, The Good Life Review, Sheepshead Review, and elsewhere. Her poetry volume has been a finalist in the Gerald Cable and Off the Grid Press book contests. A founding editor of Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, she lives in a suburb of Austin and reviews poetry submissions for Third Wednesday journal.
July 2024 | poetry
when moonlight bathes the cold marble of your headstone,
do you cling to the echoes of old laughter?
what burdens sleep in the final exhale?
you, where the tiger lilies won’t bloom
and songbirds fill spaces we cannot see you go
can you tell me if a holy hand found yours adrift
in the currents of a starlit eternity?
or is your faith another fiction?
are my questions dandelion wishes,
seeds fallen where i find you
at the edge of all my doubts,
prayers i’ll never know you hear;
can you feel the ghost of my belief
memories of silence and empty spaces we cannot fathom?
do you know
when i find the flowers dead,
i think of you
Caitie Young
Caitie L. Young (they/them) is a poet and writer from Kent, Ohio, where they earned their MFA in Creative Writing from Kent State University (NEOMFA). Their work has appeared or is forthcoming in Puerto Del Sol, new words {press}, The Atlanta Review, The Sonora Review, The Minnesota Review, and elsewhere. They were the first-place recipient of the 2022 Foothill Editors Prize for best graduate student poetry and are a pushcart nominee.
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