October 2021 | poetry
When I think of heaven, I see trash:
Broken bottles, leaking Freon, used notebooks,
Thanksgiving scraps, industrial dross, ash
Of lives that rot and leach into the brooks
And streams that feed the river, then the sea.
Yet, when I conceive a perfect hell, it looks
Unpeopled, manicured, fresh, foolproof, each tree
Equal, sidewalks flat, no black oil stain
On any gray driveway. Loveless and pure.
Why, then, am I so ashamed of my pain?
I haul my grief in my sinful junk cart,
As if I could secure peace from this vain,
Broken, human life. No, I live, not apart
From death, my pardon pawned, deep of my heart.
Richard Stimac
Richard Stimac writes poetry about growing up in the Rustbelt. Richard published poetry in Faultline, Havik (2021 Best in Show for Poetry), Michigan Quarterly Review, Penumbra, Salmon Creek Journal, Wraparound South, and others, and an article on Willa Cather in The Midwest Quarterly.
October 2021 | poetry
Just ten years ago, I felt young,
before that, not old enough.
Before now, geologists say,
there was a before, a before before
when ice, white cedar trees, and dark
brown salt deposits lined the coast.
When the waves pound the shore,
I hear the churning, churning
of saltwater like the buckled inner-
workings of the mind.
The surging of desires that wash
ashore, recede, and reemerge
like a hand extending
and then retracting itself mid-air.
On the boardwalk, a couple shares
a scone. Ahead, a child carves
a moat around a sandcastle. Above,
the seagulls seem lost—
they throw their bodies into the air
any which way, skim the water’s
surface, then take flight, as if to say:
Never mind or not today. I close
my eyes: salt turns to sugar in my mouth.
The January sun stings
my eyelids amber. Beneath this layer
is another layer: of cedar, peat,
marsh. Two teenagers giggle
with lattes. One young, the other
even younger. How many mornings,
like this one, have I already forgotten?
A Labrador chases a tennis ball
into the water and flashes its teeth.
I grin back. Day, too, froths at the mouth.
Shannon K. Winston
Shannon K. Winston’s poems have appeared in Crab Creek Review, The Night Heron Barks, RHINO, Rust + Moth, and elsewhere. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and several times for the Best of the Net. Her poetry collection, The Girl Who Talked to Paintings, was published by Glass Lyre Press in 2021. She currently lives in Princeton, New Jersey. Find her at shannonkwinston.com.
October 2021 | poetry
Plug Nickel and Red Cent
met on museum steps and, inside,
mysticked with blue innocent Della Robbia,
rhythmed the light-shine white
of beyond, above, bright,
orisoned warm-milk fired clay, like flesh,
god-child in supple mother embrace.
Sigh of centuries.
Out straight west, they drove
their wood-paneled station wagon,
out past the 30-hundreds, the 40-hundreds,
nearly to the 52-hundreds
on the table-top Chicago grid,
out to Leamington to meet the gray-pants boy,
sitting on front porch steps, in full view — a
white-red-striped t-shirt buzz-cut good-boy,
out from inside, away, at large,
watching ant-gang heft cornbread crumbles
except this one alone, down sidewalk square
to an insect Promised Land.
He looked up at the two men,
vaguely priestly, vaguely outlawed,
said: “I’m looking to flee captivity
for the sin I don’t recall committing.”
“We’re guilty, too,” they said, and
the three walked to afternoon church,
for Stations of the Cross,
flaming altar candles, up, reaching always up,
echoes, shuffling, Latin abracadabras,
plainsong up, incense up from censor,
from burning coal, straining up,
cloud of unknowing, cloud of Mount Sinai,
cloud of breathing and not breathing.
After Amen, the three split up
and went home by a different path.
Patrick T. Reardon
Patrick T. Reardon, a three-time Pushcart Prize nominee, is the author of ten books, including the poetry collections Darkness on the Face of the Deep (Kelsay) and Requiem for David (Silver Birch Press) as well as Faith Stripped to Its Essence, a literary-religious analysis of Shusaku Endo’s novel Silence. His poetry has appeared in America, Rhino, Main Street Rag, The Write Launch, Meat for Tea, Under a Warm Green Linden and many others. His book Puddin: The Autobiography of a Baby, a Memoir in Prose-poems is forthcoming from Third World Press.
October 2021 | poetry
The Autumn leaves of the maple tree
died. Standing at the tired roots, the basement pottery wheel still spinning,
I vulnerably vowed that the red finger with a long nail growing out of your eardrum
sliced the “I” in half and stuck the pieces back together sideways
into an “H,” that you heard something about hell
when I said something about us.
What always changes
doesn’t. Faithful, I parted my lips to release
the substance of things, “You (mis)heard me.”
and you heard everything
but one wor(l)d.
Words are creative fingers that slither
in throats, striving for vomit
or to make all things new,
trustworthy and
( ).
They are in skulls, nyctinastic,
ready to flick a new Gaia
back into the light, out of three tunnels,
where the power of life and death can rest in peace
as sound.
You didn’t hear (“It’s not over”)
again. Angry, you were not obligated to listen,
and it was Christian for me to apologize
for your deafness, for lacking a miracle—
out of love.
You thought the fingers were mine, for they were made
in my image. I should have spoken
outside the house we shaped children in
as a stranger, for everyone hears correctly
what matters not. Central,
I should have said that I hated you.
After promises of affection, wondrously,
you would have finally heard
what wasn’t hard to believe
and been free to live
with a sliced extremity floating within.
Now, far apart, I hope that bits don’t grow like maple seeds
or letters that could float in dark, deep, and cerebrospinal waters
and bump-merge in(to) inner speech,
but rather that fragments miraculously become
that which never existed—nothing—
metaphoric parentheses which do not suggest “fill in,”
a hope which can only be desired if
the hope is lost. At the very least,
is it wrong to think (and think and think)
wor(l)ds could be noise?
O.G. Rose
A finalist for the 2020 UNO Press Lab Prize and 46th Pushcart Nominee, Rose’s creative works appear at The Write Launch, Allegory Ridge, Streetlight Magazine, Ponder Review, Iowa Review online, The William and Mary Review, Assure Press, Toho Journal online, West Trade Review, ellipsis, Poydras Review, O:JA&L, and Broken Pencil.
October 2021 | poetry
No bright fruit now seems to hang for us,
we who never really saw a garden
or tasted anything to draw us to
the spinning core inside all seeds
or dormant roots coiled in their depths.
No taut reins seem to move us now
with unbearable symmetry
vexed equilibrium, balancing
apples, oranges with flights of swifts,
all out of place, but looking artful at first.
And what of this still whispers
through our bones, multilingual, falsetto
off ancient tongues, naming things over again
under the shade of knives, belated
breath pulsed out from hearts of wind?
What use is there in speaking now
when nothing here is reconciled;
not trees or endless streams,
nor wild geese in circling flight,
with what’s beneath the frozen ground?
Roberta Senechal de la Roche
Roberta Senechal de la Roche, Professor Emerita at Washington and Lee University, is an historian, sociologist, and poet of Miꞌkmaq and French Canadian descent, born in western Maine. She now lives in the woods outside of Charlottesville, Virginia. Her poems have appeared in the Colorado Review; Vallum; Glass: A Journal of Poetry; Yemassee, and Cold Mountain Review, among others. She has two prize-winning chapbooks: Blind Flowers (Arcadia Press) and After Eden (Heartland Review Press, 2019). A third chapbook, Winter Light, and her first book, Going Fast (2019) are published by David Robert Books.
October 2021 | poetry
Dead twelve years, dusty in a drawer
of my heart, like the leaf insects and giant earwigs
in the basement of a natural history museum.
A tiny figurine, still wearing a tattered terrycloth robe,
still holding a glass, although the ice melted long ago.
My no-idea-how-to-love-a-child mother.
My prefer-a-drink-to-playing-with-my daughter mother.
Sometimes late at night I hear her stir, accusing
me of stealing her silver or hiding her sapphire
rings, of not visiting, not calling, not caring,
threatening to beat me with her bristled brush
or toss me out like leftover broccoli and I curl up shaking,
chills shooting my spine, reaching for my stuffed bear
with its bald spots and chewed ear.
Sometimes I hear her weeping for the husband
who wasn’t, the infant who didn’t, for the child
she once was, beaten with the belt
of her father, the fists of her mother,
for the little girl wearing wool sweaters
in summer to hide swelling bruises.
If the figure were any larger, it would break my heart.
Like five loaves and three fishes feeding
five thousand on the shores of Galilee,
like free-flowing ambrosia, the ethereal food
of the gods feasting in gold and marble palaces,
you can swallow grief forever
and still there will be plenty left
in the dry basement where memories linger.
Claire Scott
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, Enizagam 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.
