April 2024 | poetry
I.
The Buddhas
tell us not
to think of
a heaven,
of a hell…
This breath comes.
That breath goes.
Then nothing.
II.
Klara Dan
von Neumann,
drove from home
to the beach—
walked into
the surf and
III.
Woolf wrote:
“Dearest, I
feel certain
I am mad …
again… I
am doing
what seems best…”
IV.
Sylvia
sealed off
the kitchen
with towels
to stop gas
from drifting
into where
her children
were sleeping.
V.
Lao Tau says:
“Heaven and
earth are not
humane. They
regard all
as straw dogs.”
VI.
The next day
morning came.
nothing at
all changed.
Straw dogs
don’t bark.
William Waters is an associate professor in the Department of English at the University of Houston Downtown. Along with Sonja Foss, he is coauthor of Destination Dissertation: A Traveler’s Guide to a Done Dissertation.
William J Waters
April 2024 | poetry
In the Peabody Library reading room, a ramshackle longing has liberty to roam,
While the rhetoric of busybodied reality bustles without and within
The center of self-knowing. Beneath the architraves scrolled with Grecian ghosts,
And over the bookcases crimped dense with Virgil’s deeds,
Twenty centuries of ‘I Am’s impartially abided to this place divorced of time.
Beside the domesticity of books, the graduate students sit, talking contentedly
Of matters related to weather, and ‘she loves you not’s’ of restrained importance,
And have exiled vellum-spined Kipling, Coleridge, Cranes’ consciousnesses
From their all-important talk, then to someplace as unreached
Within these twenty centuries and five floors of domesticity,
Below whose atrium the unconsoled words of creation
Retire into their dreadful humanity, read through perhaps and put away –
I search in heed for the truest ‘kings of infinite space.’
Wandering the columns of the Peabody,
Bordering a prodigiously fat shelf set aside for the modernist thing,
Certain truths seem forgivable to readers of certain breeds.
To chance upon a no more commonplace volume of Auden –
I turn to his ‘September 3, 1939’ two days, eighty years after the occasion
And chance upon some lady’s no more commonplace tow-color of hair,
Doubtless, having been collected by some stranger into a blonde plait,
A stranger whose limerence had left it truer bookmarked beside the verse –
‘For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.’
A young poet whose work can be best described as “allowing the glory of the mundane to permeate our understanding.”
Maxwell Tang
April 2024 | poetry
It was spring, no I mean dusk, and the killdeer began stepping up out
of intricate doors in the field.
They sported unseen fires beneath their downy vests.
Their presence had been warming the soil before the corn crop, except
for their dead sisters, brothers who had joined the soil.
No, that was in my dream, before the part where the covers had parted
and a voice I didn’t recognize asked a question.
It felt like an ancient alphabet trying to spell some message.
It left a churning in my belly for the rest of that day, and again the day
after.
And the killdeer, that first night, had yet to break their wings.
They had no fear of owls, nor of hawks in the morning, after
daybreak.
And the toe prints they left in the muddy swale read as the myth of
Osiris.
Steve Fay began life twelve miles from the Mississippi River in western Illinois. Since the mid-1970s, many journals have published his poetry, which lately appears (or is forthcoming) in: Closed Eye Open, Comstock Review, Decadent Review, Jabberwock Review, Menacing Hedge, Santa Clara Review, Tar River Poetry, The Dewdrop, TriQuarterly, and Watershed Review. His collection, what nature: Poems (Northwestern UP, 1998), was cited by the editors and board of The Orion Society as one of their 10 favorite nature/culture-related books of the 12-month period in which it appeared. He lives among wooded ravines and a donkey pasture in Fulton County, Illinois.
Steve Fay
April 2024 | poetry
It has been forty years.
he in New York me in San Francisco.
erasing him with ease for forty years. yet he is coming
and wants to meet for a drink. really?
does he regret the divorce and realize he fucked
up by sleeping with Sally and Sara and Sue?
spending weekends shuffling numbers in his fancy office
on the thirty-sixth floor. but honey
my heartstrings have moved on. happily
Married to a marvelous man. and what
would I wear? certainly not my usual jeans or sweats
that make me look dowdy. which I definitely am. but
certainly not a tight sweater over sagging boobs.
certainly not scads of makeup. which I would have to buy.
I don’t want to fire up his remorse. or do I?
vengeance sweeter than Christmas pie. especially pecan.
rolling the taste on my tongue like a butterscotch disc.
what about the bills for two-hundred dollar “massages”?
Yet we did have some good times, didn’t we? I finger
my rosary of memories. breathless in Florence
standing before David. Coins tossed
in Trevi Fountain. but honey do I really want
to reminisce? do I really want to spend strung-out nights
worrying about what to wear? and fretting
that faint embers might gleam again? flaring
with a word, a look, or even a friendly kiss.
maybe best to say I am busy.
for the next forty years.
Claire Scott is an award-winning poet who has received multiple Pushcart Prize nominations. Her work has appeared in the Atlanta Review, Bellevue Literary Review, New Ohio Review and Healing Muse among others. Claire is the author of Waiting to be Called and Until I Couldn’t. She is the co-author of Unfolding in Light: A Sisters’ Journey in Photography and Poetry.
Claire Scott
January 2024 | poetry
I am okay with being
monstrous, I know
how you view me when I
step out with three heads, I
know the many ways
you think of me.
The day folds
up into a tiny square
which I put into my
middle mouth, underneath its
tongue. Watch the neck twitch.
I am many things but
easy is not one. I try to
hold myself between my
fingers and you know
what happens. Are you
formless as water, like me?
When did you last throw a knife
into a mirror, bare your
teeth with eyes
wide from hunger?
When they first clothed me,
somewhere in the midst of me,
a twig snapped.
And it radiated outward
like a bomb.
Zeke Shomler
Zeke Shomler is currently pursuing a combined MA/MFA at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. His work has appeared in Cordite, Stone Poetry Quarterly, After Happy Hour Review, and elsewhere online.
January 2024 | poetry
hovers over your coiffed head, cawing in protest at the abominable stench rising, tears in its eyes, close to regurgitating its hard-sought lunch. Coleridge. Coleridge. Coleridge, you dotard. Have you no pity? No mercy? Must you pollute the earth’s air with poetry, chasing me as I flee your icy bewilderment? Must you call after me, your hideous voice echoing against the bruised clouds? Why should I not kill you for such elemental transgressions, silent seas be damned; your shrieks mutes the thunder, your delirium churns the slimy sea, my home, turning it against me and my kind. Rotting darkened sea, my frosted ass. Spare me your off-rhymes, the failed slants, the tortured rhythms. They fall from my ears no easier than my carcass was dropped from your neck. Father. Feather. Further. Forfend. Yet you claim a tale to share, a future to save. A weaver of lies like you need only make boast to be believed. Dead, yet I am able to nest in your grey beard, to ponder mortalities whilst you blamed me as if I was the cross Jesus bore. What calumny. What hubris. What a drug-induced delirium. I was never your interlocutor. The magnet that drew your warped dreams outward. Your ship sails without me, my stilled wings offer no forward aid. Yet your heart drums another beat, a stilled sorrow, something that blackens the stars and cauterizes cataracts and keeps the soul anchored to watery earth. You see the prayerless dead. The moon that abandons those who look to the sky. Stars that failed and fell far away from those who needed their comforting light. Sleepless, you laid this burden around my withered neck, seeking to save your miserable own. Not enough that I was dead, you laid heavier burdens upon my wizened neck, and sought freedom from a past that held you tight, kept your lungs from filling, and drew its life as yours. Already dead, you lingered in a denatured bliss, a world without, a sphere unbound, lacking angels and song, and any answer to a prayer unasked. Your ship sailed without you, and will dock without snow or mist. No waves will follow your path. No wind will calm or breathe to ensure your warped heaven. No blind sailors will raise sails or secure a rudder for your voyage. Nothing can rise from this sorrowed moon’s passage.
Richard Weaver
Post-Covid, the author has returned as writer-in-residence at the James Joyce Pub in Baltimore. Among his other pubs: conjunctions, Vanderbilt Review, Southern Quarterly, Free State Review, Hollins Critic, Misfit Magazine, Loch Raven Review, The Avenue, New Orleans Review, & Burningword. He’s the author of The Stars Undone (Duende Press, 1992), and wrote the libretto for the symphony, Of Sea and Stars (2005). He was a finalist in the 2019 Dogwood Literary Prize in Poetry. His 200th Prose poem was recently published.
Page 3 of 247«12345...102030...»Last »
