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)
July 2021 | poetry
Our clock.
Do you remember? The one we bought at the edge of the world? The shop being pulled into the ocean ? She has rounded the bend. She’s played her song.
The crickets still chirp. The moon still shines.
Outside, the world is covered in silver dust. Outside, the trees and the stones are getting colder and colder and colder.
Let’s agree that pajamas are for puritans. We are of this world. We were made to sleep with feathers. We were made for open windows. We were made to be together.
Ask the scientists. There is a temperature perfect for sleeping. It’s the temperature of you and me close enough to warm, but not close enough to burn.
Pajamas, my darling, only get in the way.
Shawn Pfunder
Shawn Pfunder is a writer, performer, and creative coach. He studied poetry and fiction at the University of Montana. He is the author of the poetry book, I Believe in a God Who Roller Skates. Shawn lives in Phoenix, Arizona with a medium-sized dog.
July 2021 | poetry, Pushcart nominee
When we were kids, in junior school
in Pembrokeshire, we didn’t do wild
or joyful, didn’t do great and glorious.
We wore limp ties, half-skewed,
over blue-green cotton shirts, grey shorts,
and tugged long, drooping woollen socks.
We hoarded foreign stamps, played marbles,
were drilled in tables, verbs and chalk,
hoofed at a soggy leather football.
There were a few quick early sallies
down the rapids of River Joy, first sounds
maybe of Elvis, first scents of dances,
first date .. but that was soon washed up
on the banks of embarrassment.
One first big joy, first rush of rhapsody,
was our trip to the London Planetarium,
the sunrise scene, to Morning from Peer Gynt,
and the sense of a wondrous opening-out.
The price, as I remember, was a shilling.
First weeks in university. Posters and politics
and arguments over midnight coffee
and then, with such a shot to the emotions,
the new black friends in the hall of residence,
Femi from Nigeria, Zac from Ghana,
Astley from Jamaica. Back home we’d read
of Windrush and Brixton and rioting
and landladies (no dogs, no blacks, no Irish).
Now suddenly these charming, genial men.
The fellowship. The joy of it.
That was October 1960
and it seemed absurdly simple.
Robert Nisbet
Robert Nisbet is a Welsh poet whose work has appeared recently in the USA in San Pedro River Review, Main Street Rag, Third Wednesday, Burningword Literary Journal, and many online journals. He has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
July 2021 | poetry
Into the foothills:
individuated and
intentional, like tumuli,
poised in geometric solitude;
yet reiterant—
battologizing in every direction
like a lavish obsession;
Over the clatter of lava scree,
down stress-cracked arroyos
polyped with balsamroot,
astride dustracks canine and human,
over roots of gnarled fir that
knuckle the trail like black fingers.
Into the foothills, then,
you run—
without optimism,
suspecting all summits false,
enduring your own shadowy weather—
unending systems of shifting mentalese;
Overtaking strangers wordless
and passing through strands of huddled pine
sunk with errant shafts of yellow light,
networks of crows bruiting your
course in the canopies above.
With ragged breath and aching limb,
you are lifted and lowered,
left to pursue protracted arcs,
like the practitioner of an esoteric ritual,
like the epigone of a mathematical formula.
Compacted and sunbaked into pavement
the path rattles talus and tibia,
climbs the fickle architecture of your spine,
and delivers spoonfuls of annihilation.
Into the foothills, then,
you are running—
not speaking,
but hanging on
the susurrus of the breeze,
listening intently,
trying to hear the urgent call of the world.
James F. Latin
Jimmy Latin is in his fourth year of Honours English at Concordia University (Montreal). He writes poetry, fiction, and non-fiction.
July 2021 | poetry
for Joel
There were fields around our homes, Joel,
some fallow for a season, others full of maize.
Around them were the woods, in winter
a filigree of witch-fingers clutching at the sky,
in summer, overgrowing every boundary.
Enclosed within the symmetry of corn rows
and houses, we slept well at night, although
boys’ thoughts drift and shape-shift.
We could see there was no reconciliation
between the earth and our back and forth
attempts at order. Fences falling groundward
succumbed beneath vines. An orchard grown wild
was our prototype for Eden. Its apples were picked
by deer, or left in the grass as God intended,
rotting with their wasted cider.
In the north country now, I imagine people are burning
leaves. Fire runs through them like a loose dog.
From the hillside, you can see smoke rising, a man
standing there beside the bonfire, watching. A woman
comes out from the house. It’s almost a ritual scene.
There are no leaves burning in this yard.
I hear voices from inside the cafe, but I’m alone
beneath a locust tree, drinking coffee,
watching two men in the next yard over
gather tomatoes they grew somehow amid the ruins
of a Brooklyn townhouse. Odd angles, old brick
mold-mottled, and those green, gaunt vines
that twist and zigzag, and branch out, emerald lightning.
The property was abandoned back in March
when they cut the chainlink fence. Together,
they cleared as much of the soil as they could
of stones and glass. Boards protruding from the ground,
like the bones of a half-buried animal, they pulled loose
and set up to hold the twine they used
for a makeshift trellis. They planted their sprouts.
As the season advanced, they appeared more
at home. One of them hung art on the remnants of a wall,
portraits painted by children, his own, I guessed,
faces composed of bright colors that matched
the beans and peppers, and tall sunflowers whose
big dials of yellow petals counted down the hours.
Someone mid-summer tried to mend the fence.
A sign was posted: NO TRESPASSING!
PROPERTY FOR SALE.
It didn’t stop them. Today, they are laughing,
picking the ripened fruit and vegetables,
gathering the good in baskets, tossing the bad away.
Their joy, their exuberance in their work,
how could it be for just tomatoes?
Whenever I saw them weeding in the sun,
shirts off, sweat curdling through their skin,
they reminded me of the parable about a man
who sold everything he owned in order to buy
the field where he found a hidden pearl.
Have I misunderstood them? Maybe that heavy, red fruit
is more than enough. But we lived according to the poem:
living within, / you beget, self-out-of-self,
selfless, / the pearl of great price.1
Joel, we haven’t talked in years. I can’t guess anymore
what you are feeling, if your optimism we shared survives.
Addicted to the opium of poetry, I foster in myself
that one impurity, hoping to work it into luster,
but it’s funny to think that all it takes to undo a pearl
is one cup of vinegar.
_________________________________________
1 H.D. “The Walls Do Not Fall” 4.43-46
William Welch
William Welch lives in Utica, NY, where he works as a registered nurse on a critical care unit, and also as editor of Doubly Mad, a literary and visual arts journal published by The Other Side of Utica, Inc. His work has appeared in numerous journals, most recently in Thimble Literary Magazine, Rust+Moth, and Stone Canoe. His poem “The Border” was a finalist for the 2020 Adelaide Literary Award for Poetry.
