October 2021 | poetry
Smoke
“I do not see the need to burn the houses of those slaughtered;
everything has already been taken,” I say over strong tea and thick porridge.
My colleague says I will not make a good bandit, that I do not understand the effectiveness
of hideous acts to achieve future obedience. And I wish that were true.
In this dust and smoked-filled harmattan night, with a moon blood orange and near full,
my breath is shallow. I cannot avoid the greedy sucking of shisha by expats—
some false sophistication of those closer to death by lungs marked and rotting,
like my grandfather’s at the sallow, emaciated end, despite decades free from the habit.
Before me, one man swims laps methodically. Up and down the middle of the pool.
Hardly a ripple. His broad back barely rising to allow his mouth to draw in air.
His arms deep beneath him to glide scarcely seen. The thick water calls me, to dive, to crawl,
to sink into oxygen free of carbon, to savor moments free of fumes and dust and pain.
Wolves
In Guam, invasive tree snakes invent a new way to slither.
Good news for their survival;
bad for nesting starlings.
In Washington, men with furs and Molotovs storm the Capitol.
Coddlers and goaders slowly renounce them,
try to make themselves palatable in the new light.
In my garden, overrun with green,
a juvenile stag, nubs where horns will be,
curls himself to sleep. Back so thin I count each vertebrae.
They become a rosary. Hail Marys replaced with silent thanks
as I breathe with this deer, safe here and now from wildcats,
as the hummingbird circles for sage.
Heather Bourbeau
Heather Bourbeau’s work has appeared or will appear in 100 Word Story, Alaska Quarterly Review, The Kenyon Review, The MacGuffin, Meridian, The Stockholm Review of Literature, and SWWIM. She is the winner of La Piccioletta Barca’s inaugural competition and the Chapman Magazine Flash Fiction winner and has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She has worked with various UN agencies, including the UN peacekeeping mission in Liberia and UNICEF Somalia.
October 2021 | poetry
Love makes the wheels go round— as in, your heart is a vehicle
conveyed through small towns, worn-out suitcase you drag, only
stopping at the fair for pickled eggs, magenta jar of luck & hope.
Those tiny bobbing heads, kraken, sailors tell themselves at night.
Here, the Ferris wheel is broken down and all the lights look dim,
forsaken while you wander round the same dirt path. The clam
booth steams just like the sea— though you’re in Pennsylvania.
The pie ladies are smiling from their perch which smells like pine.
It’s been redone, still lemon, apple, rhubarb, they preach & hum.
Renounce, renounce & have a slice. Because the night, because
you’re home & you’re redeemed. Beside the swings, you halt.
See someone you used to know; he is old, does not see you.
That chartreuse light of August glowed just beyond the ballfield
when you first came. Now the hawkers at the candy apple stand
put on their lights & all the games draw in the younger crowd.
You pitch dimes in old thin jars, try to win back the family name.
Then the Ferris wheel begins to turn and soon the fireworks will
parachute chrysanthemums into the dark. One year when you
were young, you were stuck at the top with a boy you liked.
Kids waved thin sparklers on the hill like dots of fireflies.
Hello, hello, you want to shout. Remember me? But no one
yells. And no one comes to sit near you. The carnival man
jerks his finger. You are next. He clamps you down in metal.
You ride in huge moist circles, your heart lurching at the top.
Ellen Stone
Ellen Stone advises a poetry club at Community High School and co-hosts a monthly poetry series, Skazat! in Ann Arbor, Michigan where she raised three daughters with her husband. She is the author of What Is in the Blood (Mayapple Press, 2020) and The Solid Living World (Michigan Writers’ Cooperative Press, 2013). Ellen’s poetry has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Reach Ellen at ellenstone.org.
October 2021 | poetry
Come in come in I’m so glad
you could come how good
to see you I’m fine thanks just fine
lunch is laid out in the dining room
let’s open the wine
so we can enjoy ourselves
take your plate into the garden
the lilies she planted last fall
have just come into bloom
yes lovely
do take a second helping
I gave the caterers her special recipe
have another glass of wine
the music was beautiful
wasn’t it
she helped plan everything
that was our niece who sang
marvellous voice I’m fine
really fine everything
just like she’d wanted
wonderful
to see you let’s have a hug
do stay a bit
we’ll all go out to dinner
there’s a great place
we used to
thanks so much
for coming, goodbye yes
it went well
so nice
you could come
get together soon
you’re the last
wish
you could stay
I’ll walk you to your car
fine
love you
fine
give us a kiss
until fine
later of course
I’m fine
thanks
just fine
Ruth Bavetta
Ruth Bavetta’s poems have appeared in Rattle, Nimrod, North American Review, Tar River Poetry, Slant, American Journal of Poetry, and many other journals and anthologies. Her fifth book will be published in 2022. She has been an Associate Editor for Good Works Review and has been nominated for Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize.
July 2021 | poetry
Some days I don’t recognize myself—when
I step from the shower and catch a glimpse
of my face clouded with steam
and all I have from all of my yesterdays is
a smudge on an old polaroid—as if a pair of bees
could remember themselves out of honeycomb,
having fallen to the ground—I don’t know
who I am, not just the story of who I am—
the secrets I need answers to are watching
from the cedar-limbs by a pair of blackbirds
hidden in snow. Even the cupboards could hold
a gentle sheen or a soft glow, as if
a chain of memories could be mended, once
broken, when the moonlight pierces the reeds
and paints the sea the muddled green of grief.
If I chose to tread through this endlessness,
I’d start to imagine waves crashing and then
slowly molding a long white beach—
How do we hold ourselves against the abyss?
Eric Stiefel
Eric Stiefel is a Cuban-American Ph.D. candidate at Ohio University, though he received his MFA from Washington University in St. Louis, where he also served as the 2017-2018 Junior Poetry Fellow. Eric was named the winner of the 2018 Sequestrum New Writer Awards and a finalist in the 2018 Penn Review Poetry Prize and the 2020 Third Coast Poetry Contest. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Apple Valley Review, Prism Review, The Literary Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Frontier Poetry, and elsewhere.
July 2021 | poetry
She peels gum from the sidewalk,
pops it in her mouth, ignores the grit.
There is some sweetness left.
Skip and chew, skip and chew,
she gloats to herself—sure that none
of her siblings had gum today.
She once heard her mother say—
Don’t ever swallow gum or it’ll stay
in your stomach for seven years.
Seven plus seven—I’ll be fourteen then.
* * *
Tonight for dinner, again they pick
dandelions in the backyard, catch
crayfish from the brook.
She eats the bitter salad. Refuses the meat.
For dessert—she retrieves her gum
from beneath the table.
The sweetness is gone.
She thinks of another place to stick it—
on a park bench, the apple tree trunk,
the tar-coated telephone pole—
because she can’t swallow it.
She just can’t.
Seven years is a long time.
Lisa J. Sullivan
Lisa J. Sullivan holds an MFA in Poetry from the Solstice Low-Residency MFA Program at Pine Manor College, where she was a Kurt Brown Memorial Fellow. Her work has appeared in The American Journal of Poetry, The Comstock Review, Puckerbrush Review, and elsewhere. Her ekphrastic piece “To the Bog of Allen” was selected as the United States Winner of the 2013 Ireland Poetry Project contest in collaboration with the Academy of American Poets. She is an associate editor for Lily Poetry Review Books and a poetry editor for Pink Panther Magazine.
July 2021 | poetry
Six weeks
after I began ninth grade,
Mother went to bed.
She closed drapes, hid
autumn light, knotted
her body beneath winter blankets.
Seven years earlier,
her brother went to work
then crawled under his desk,
mumbling.
White jackets took him away
and whispers I overheard
spoke of electroshock therapy,
depression.
Confused by my feelings,
I asked no forgiveness
for liking the new quiet,
but it felt strange
to exist without her anger,
her disappointment.
I pedaled to the cemetery,
walked among tombstones,
sorting my unsettled mind
as I questioned skeletal remains.
There was John, the soldier
from South Carolina
whose brother had disappeared.
But not under blankets.
I asked James, the eldest
of ten children, what he knew
about living in the dark.
He kept it simple, suggested
I leave her alone,
get on with my life.
I bemoaned my transfer
to a new school,
but Daniel, who grew up
on a farm in south Georgia,
laughed, said school was school
and I should just shut up.
Or pack a bag and run away.
My choice.
I thanked them all,
bid them good night
and rode home
as streetlights began to buzz.
Is she thinking
about my mistakes,
storing up punishment
and criticism to use
when she gets well?
Will she get well?
And who is cooking dinner?
Linda Wimberly
Linda Wimberly is a writer, artist and musician from Marietta, GA. A former Vermont Studio Center resident in writing, her poetry has appeared in The Raw Art Review, Lunch Ticket, Stone River Sky: An Anthology of Georgia Poems and others and a short story appeared in Cricket. She is a self-taught abstract artist and her images have appeared in or been cover art for jelly bucket, Critical Pass Review, Inscape Magazine and others. Her image “Woman on the Move” won the 2019 Art Contest for So to Speak: feminist journal of language and art. (lindawimberly.com)
