January 2024 | poetry
Between 1860 and 1939, thousands of poor young women
from Eastern European shtetls were sold into sexual slavery
by the Jewish-run Zwi Migdal crime syndicate which controlled
highly profitable brothels in Brazil, Argentina and the U.S.
How to pry open the iris of footnote.
As they stooped around rickety tables
on dirt floors they imagined an orange
a day and gold capped teeth. So peasant
girls with milky skin and luscious hair
left their hardscrabble shtetls sleeved
in promise from so many visiting Prince
Charmings in patent-leather shoes,
tailored trousers, and silk handkerchiefs
soaked in rose water to temper poverty’s stench.
By ship or train, the new air of a new world
was double-dealing, empty of marriage,
seamstress careers, or taffeta finery. Instead
the air was burdened with fear and sadness,
immigrant streets of trapped women in the many
“convents” of Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro, or
New York’s Lower East Side. Yoked by greedy
pimps to another kind of assembly line with rape
the often tool of the trade, each Eve did
their bidding, merchandise of the counterfeit kind.
And so the bruised skin of days and nights
began—the who’s your daddy in a labyrinth
of rooms with flimsy plywood partitions
in dilapidated clapboard brothels, to feel
the not feeling of pressure at their napes,
stale breath of sugarcane alcohol, rough
hands to paw their breasts, pry open
their thighs, the insignificance of release.
These transplanted sisters forced and entered,
counted and discounted, dank scent of lavender
struggling to find their no’s.
Forged letters back home to Odessa,
Lodz, Krakow, Kiev. I’m afraid your daughter
is lost forever. She’s a woman who belongs
to everybody now. Yiddish rhymes from childhood
whispered to soothe their cheap camisoled sleep.
The spit at their heels, hushed children crossing
cobblestones when their red lipsticked, heavily rouged,
high-heeled clicks came by. These colonized flower buds
that rotted in shame and syphilis, beatings and stabbings,
yellow fever, tuberculosis, or the exhausted swallow
of carbolic acid.
How to heal the script for these women of footnote long gone—
the Bruchas, Rebeccas, Sophias, and Rosas, the Klaras, Olgas,
Lenas and Helenas, the Berthas, Isabels, Rachels, and Fannys.
Today, we perform your tahara cleansing your bodies with
cascades of sacred water to comfort and purify you at last.
Rikki Santer
Rikki Santer’s poetry has been published widely and has received many honors including several Pushcart and Ohioana book award nominations, a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities, and in 2023 she was named Ohio Poet of the Year. She is currently serving as vice-president of the Ohio Poetry Association and is a member of the teaching artist roster of the Ohio Arts Council. Her twelfth poetry collection, Resurrection Letter: Leonora, Her Tarot, and Me, is a sequence in tribute to the surrealist artist Leonora Carrington. Please contact her through her website, https://rikkisanter.com.
January 2024 | poetry
Specifically,
the girl falling
hard enough from the saddle
to clack her teeth.
Just under my favorite tree.
The man: lean into it.
(He does, the tree.)
Unicycle’s like walking
on your hands. You’re
always in a state of almost
falling. Lean into it
or you land on your ass.
So she sets up again,
white lip knuckle-crook
contact, whole earth
like a pendulum.
I never got the hang
of that either, she says.
Generally,
what passes for summer
in these parts. A golden crown
sparrow hops clear,
watches her wobble
by in broken light like
it was nothing new.
Keith T. Fancher
Keith T. Fancher is not a poet. Born in the California redwoods and raised in the Blue Ridge foothills, he holds degrees in computer science and film studies. Nonetheless, his work has appeared in Poetry Northwest, Red Ogre Review, OPEN: Journal, Right Hand Pointing, and elsewhere. He lives in San Francisco.
January 2024 | poetry
I live near Brooklyn’s Gowanus Canal,
a toxic and fetid tidal estuary from its salted
harbor mouth to its abrupt industrial end.
It is my pixel of wilderness in the city.
Tonight I heard the night heron quawk—
Thought it was a ghost. Flight is silence,
a glimpse of white on the wing, a memory
out of reach, the perfect shadow.
Cormorants hunt the same water by day
They do not perch. They paddle low
in the water, wings cupped to torso,
eyes up, sudden arch, minimal ripple.
Disappear into the murky green.
The plunging pursuit of prey propelled
by black webbed feet. What persistence
it must take to hunt in such dismal silt.
Poets know the tired metaphor of truths
that lie beneath the surface. Know the patient
wait to snatch a glimpse of glimmer. But
to swim, to hunt in our turbid psyches,
where madness lurks, or doubloons wait,
takes a persistence of cormorants.
Gerald Wagoner
Gerald Wagoner, author of When Nothing Wild Remains, (Broadstone Books, 2023), and A Month of Someday, (Indolent Books, 2023) says his childhood was divided between Eastern Oregon and Cut Bank, Montana, where he was raised under the doctrine of benign neglect. Gerald has lived in Brooklyn, NY since 1982. He exhibited widely and taught Art & English for the NYC Department of Education. 2018: Visiting Poet Residency Brooklyn Navy Yard. 2019, 2021-23: Curator/ host of A Persistence of Cormorants, an outdoors reading series by the Gowanus Canal. 2023 April, Poets Afloat Mini-Residency, Waterfront Barge Museum. Education: U of Montana, BA Creative Writing, 1970, SUNY Albany, MA & MFA Sculpture Selected Publications: Beltway Quarterly, BigCityLit, Blue Mountain Review, Cathexis Northwest Press, Night Heron Barks, Ocotillo Review, Right Hand Pointing, Maryland Literary Review.
January 2024 | poetry
I attended a party hosted by one of my university
English professors. The party was timid. Everyone
in a house full of friendless people. Soon, I see
my professor is flirting on my date. I am across the patio
talking to a stoned lonely classmate near the nacho
salsa station, and my prof, swinging jigging away,
making my date giggle, smile, move, bob and sway.
The world is glorious and cruel. Full of voids
impossible to fill and so hard to ignore.
My professor was working hard to diminish
his middle-age pansa: running his hand through his hair,
leaning forward, holding that cigarette but not lighting it.
Does this really work? When does his ex step in? And I wonder
if this is me in twenty years. Drifting to bad jazz, citing Derrida,
considering busted summers in Prague, then back to all this,
hosting a house of students and colleagues
without anyone causing a lucha, because no one thinks anything
is worth throwing a punch. Nada happens.
I had this friend who launched off a table
in a crowded bar because he saw his novia
dancing with a gringo. Did my friend think she really
had a Sancho? (Remember this: action is often a good
remedy for grief). He flew into the dancers,
a super-villain returning to earth. His cape a flash
of cursing. A big fight, the boogying couples scattering
off the dancefloor. After the incident, and him
banished from the club, I spied him and la novia, seated
on a curb in the parking lot. She cupping his face
in tenderness insisting, she loved him, loved
him. Chanting it. The night sky believing all
of her. My friend looking down into the alley,
discovering his bruises, adjusting his ripped
camisa, her words all shadow and dusk.
Christopher Rubio-Goldsmith
Christopher Rubio-Goldsmith was born in Merida, Yucatan, grew up in Tucson, Arizona and taught English at Tucson High School for 27 years. Much of his work explores growing up near the border, being raised biracial/bilingual, and teaching in a large urban school where 70% of the students are American/Mexican. A Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee, his writings will appear in Drunk Monkeys, Inverted Syntax and have been published in Sky Island Journal, Muse, Discretionary Love and other places too. His wife, Kelly, sometimes edits his work, and the two cats seem happy.
January 2024 | poetry
ankle-winged Word Thief flutters ~
orbiting The Muse
wicker creel on shoulder
stealing words off succumbing tongue, from depraved pink lips
collecting manifestos, dispatches, commands, lexeme-threads for unborn poems.
deliciously spilled onto insatiable empty page
deciphering their tangled satisfying meaning
blustery afternoons, elven queens, entangled roots, deep set red brick walls, swim in halo eyes outside time and space, float and dream, bask in caressing warmth, a vision, possibility, sensuality. Mythological building blocks held down on the table ~
kaleidoscopic paper spun round
allowing entry inside
to new worlds.
Gleipnir bindings hold winged ankles fast to Little Deaths.
faultless weapons handling in niche darkness.
stiff bow
arrow loosed
raining towards purposed destination
crossing through streaks of bright light
fleshed out totemic monument pierces orienting Dionysian-natured North Star
drowning inspirational beacon in gratification
seeking simultaneous orgasmic release of the lore-neuron
greedy minds shine with mythic legend veneer
wandering the halls around midnight
for satisfying heights of pleasure
organic and ever-changing panoply of wonders and sensations
lingering into daylight-crippling twilight delight
intent on breaking prey
the beast is afoot, baiting; heavily armed with unpredictable body language.
safe, at a distance
summoning strategic Sun Tzu’s ancient wisdom
the way, the weather, the terrain, the leadership, the discipline
coding memories of my nightmares, my fantasies.
verklempt knight walks seven unlit blocks to doors that can’t be closed after opening.
tectonic plates shifting under pace-worn leather boots.
Paineater stills the chaos
disarms the shadows
guards the spiraling-wanderer.
J. M. Platts-Fanning
J. M. Platts-Fanning is an award-winning writer nestled within the woodlands of the wave-tousled coastline of Prince Edward Island. Recipient of a PEI Writers’ Guild2022Island Literary Poetry Award, 2020 Island Literary Short Story Award, the 2022 Battle Tales VII Champion and 2nd place winner in the Humans of the World 2022 Summer Poetry Challenge. Publications include, The Dalhousie Review 2024, Burningword Literary Journal 2024, Pownal Street Press’ 2023 anthology, Fiona: Prince Edward Island Accounts from Canada’s Biggest Storm, Toronto Metropolitan University’s White Wall Review 2023/03, 2022/11, The Write Launch literary magazine 2023/08, 2022/08, 2022/06, Prometheus Dreaming cultural magazine 2022/11, Artistic Warrior’s 2022 Dribbles, Drabbles and Postcards anthology, Common Ground 2020/03 and GIFt Horse anthologies Vol 1 through 5. Her plays have appeared on various theatrical stages, including her dystopian fable, “Apple Bones” performed at the 2021 PEI Community Theatre Festival, “An Answer to the Question on Death” staged at Fridays with Fringe in 2019 and “Held to the Fire” chosen for Watermark Theatre’s 2018 Play Reading Series.
January 2024 | poetry
What Does Persephone Want?
Our daughter Persephone comes and goes.
She plays peek-a-boo with Oxycodone
and Ambien. She likes it in the dark,
a paradox for when she goes she takes
our sun with her and leaves us only night.
When she returns, she brings pallor and chill
and slumps in sleep like asparagus boiled
to limp defeat. She carries bruises, too,
as if she wrestled with demons or gods
and did not quite escape their fiercest holds.
We welcome our daughter, this almost ghost
who does not smile or speak, who barely lifts
her head. We feed her favored fruits and honey,
make evident (we think) our love, but she—
she sleeps and only sleeps as if the weight
of waking crushes her, as if she has
become her great grandmother, embodiment
of death who waits (asleep) to take the last
step from this world to the next, as if done,
done, done, and unwilling to wrestle more.
We Have to Let Persephone Go
Our daughter Persephone went down to death
to see what it was like and liked it well enough
to stay the whole season in darkness and damp
in that underground of hidden things and worms.
With her, she took her secret toys and our joy
and left for us her sad-eyed terrier mix,
her unfinished business, and a disco wig
of purple tinsel that seemed to spark with light.
We imagined her scrubbing her hair with dirt
and soaking in rejuvenating mud baths
then returning more youthful and radiant
than before, our one daughter renewed, re-born.
When it became clear she was not coming back,
we offered to visit her there, to bring her
the red cinnamon candy she preferred
or that frozen yogurt sold by the pound
and layered with multi-colored sprinkles,
but she said we could not come, could not yet pass
the needle’s eye as she had done. We were left
bereft as when she went to college but more.
Cecil Morris
Cecil Morris retired after 37 years of teaching high school English, and now he tries writing what he spent so many years teaching others to understand and (he hopes) to enjoy. He has poems appearing or forthcoming in English Journal, Rust + Moth, Sugar House Review, Willawaw Journal, and other literary magazines.
