July 2024 | poetry
while we play about our mother’s feet
potatoes spill from their netted bag
across the countertop
knife in hand, my mother chooses a dusty one,
washes it, turns it, strips it to pale flesh
brown peels fall into the kitchen sink
with a nimble pivot of her hands
her simple red blouse is tucked into jeans
dark hair loose around her face
she smiles, cradling a large lumpy potato
as the kitchen curtains, sky-blue, flutter around her
and our father, bending to the adoration
—takes her in his arms
Shutta Crum
Shutta Crum is the recipient of 8 Royal Palm Literary Awards (FL) including for When You Get Here (gold). Her poems have appeared in journals such as Boulevard, Acumen, MER. Nominated for a Pushcart, her 3rd chapbook came out in 2023. Her books for young readers include many in verse. www.shutta.com
July 2024 | poetry
Speak for yourself.
Bet on your own naked wanting,
which is also a losing dog.
Who are you to say I ever lived
a half-life? Like copacetic
isotopes of love.
What a waste of clean pain.
Oh well,
almost green with aliveness choosing
to say nothing over forgiveness.
Light falls over
an empty house like
you have ever been truthful.
What were you hoping for?
The Dogwood lights
easy as a lie.
What a goddamn shame.
You are nightless at heart,
a murmur of a lover
and also the rain.
And also the rain.
Hannah Cook
Hannah Cook is a 24-year-old poet, certified forklift driver, & rat girl. She loves reading, writing, crawling in your walls, and lying about innocuous things for fun. She received her BFA in Interdisciplinary Studies from Boise State University and is pursuing her MFA in Poetry at the University of Minnesota in the fall of 2024. Her poetry concerns itself deeply with matters of desire, love, sex, self-annihilation, generational trauma, identity, and domestic abuse. While spilling recklessly with love and tenderness, her poems also speak to an unbearable, unavoidable thread of loneliness and grief as a condition of desire. Hannah rages, shamelessly, planting milkweed for the company of the final monarchs. Hannah loves, hauntingly, gathering yarrow for the lost.
July 2024 | poetry
In youth we dawdle over flesh in the water,
primed for our prime like an irreducible number.
Reaping dividends from Arctic melt, we look
to the parity of starlight and the perennial
rotation of ground-level fuel. Nefarious grains
grow row upon row on a landscape peppered
with invention. Noteworthy wings slip
echolocation. What do the bees stipulate, or
the last wolverine unbound from a glacier?
The hairline-fractured earth revises who and what exists.
Through rainout and burnout, animation erodes.
In senescence we dally with locked vertebrae. We seek
a strawberry asylum in which to nibble light transformed
into substance. We too are substance. Verifiably tasty.
Alan Elyshevitz
Alan Elyshevitz is the author of a collection of stories, The Widows and Orphans Fund (SFA Press), a poetry collection, Generous Peril (Cyberwit), and five poetry chapbooks, most recently Approximate Sonnets (Orchard Street). Winner of the James Hearst Poetry Prize from North American Review, he is a two-time recipient of a fellowship in fiction writing from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts.
July 2024 | poetry
Three First Grade Boys on the Titanic
Three boys squat
in the Book Corner
looking down
at the open heart of history.
One boy exclaims:
I wish I was on the Titanic.
Another replies with logic:
You can’t be on it.
A third who knows about attention
and the need to make an impact
to be noticed, to exist, states:
I was on the Titanic. I was. I was.
The two other boys don’t respond,
just keeping looking down at the picture
of the ship being sundered, closing
around the book like a prayer,
while the third, silently ousted,
wonders if his lie was in fact a kind of truth.
A Steiner Piano Shop
There’s a Steiner Piano Shop in Lake Oswego now.
The millionaires who wow the lake in record numbers,
in palaces policed by cameras, scraped and landscaped
by immigrant workers, stocked with pouty power boats
and gleaming Teslas can now insist their children clatter
through Mozart whilst they plan weekend wake-surfing
on the lake, too dirty to swim in, and family trips
to the Caribbean, second homes, thanking God
there’s no homeless camps and fentanyl addiction
in their downtown. Close the gate, security cameras on,
kids all tucked up with the latest fairy tale mirrors
while the dog roams its empty, echoing territory.
Matthew James Friday
Matthew James Friday is a British-born writer and teacher. He has published many poems in the US and international journals. His first chapbook, The Residents, will be published by Finishing Line Press in the summer of 2024. He has published numerous micro-chapbooks with the Origami Poems Project. Matthew is a Pushcart Prize-nominated poet. Visit his website at http://matthewfriday.weebly.com
July 2024 | poetry
My kid won’t go to school
anymore.
Morning finds her buried
in her sleep,
her father at her door
pleading.
We were violent at first,
me throwing off her covers, she
kicking.
She bit me once.
Now we have a pattern,
I beg
a short time through
her hollow door.
She clings to silence
til I’m gone.
She knows she’s wrong,
hates herself.
Retreating, I know
she’s right.
We scroll the same scenes
all day.
Presidents laughing
onstage
over bombs for Israel.
Yesterday
in Gaza, a food line
was shot to pieces.
Moms and kids.
And here?
A students crack,
C students
are doomed.
Last spring a classmate
jumped off,
a senior OD’d
this fall.
My brother’s kids were
locked down
last year while a classmate
shot
his homeroom.
The usual.
My daughter says she’s bored
by nature.
Waterfalls, canyons,
oceans.
Last year Mount Rainier,
she wants to
go back to the car
and sleep.
No longer sublime,
the world
holds no secrets.
Not even the laws that
govern us.
Only the dumb persistence
of atoms.
We understand they’re
in the Tube,
these kids. The Blitz above.
We adults
are afraid, our talk
dull bluster
in the dark. The kids
have seen this.
Life is a thing that wants
them dead.
Later I will bring
her lunch.
James Caton
James Caton is an emerging author whose work has appeared or is forthcoming in Impossible Task, Arboreal, La Piccioletta Barca, and The MacGuffin. He is completing a book of poems, Nakba and Other Poems. He lives in Ann Arbor.
July 2024 | poetry, Pushcart nominee
Elect
Toast with choice wine the elect.
Toast the vampires, bad boys, hyenas,
stone-cold demons and assholes
strolling the halls of heaven,
side by saintly side with hermits and virgins,
stumbled apostles, unwed social justice mothers,
preachers-to-the-animals,
preacher dragged to the fire,
girl soldier dragged to the fire,
mothers, fathers, babies unbaptized,
founders of monastic communities,
fallen archbishops, Juan Diego,
the poor and unsightly, the troubled rich
— which is to say, every one of wealth —
robbers who love their father,
lost tribes of angels,
archdeacons who don’t get along with each other,
holy men wrestling with Satan,
the innocent old, Job, the inside traders,
the cashing-in and the cashiered,
holy men wrestling with an angel
or a Deity maybe,
break the rib, dislocate the hip.
Collect the elect
— the hell-raisers and hell-preachers,
the abject, reject, object,
subject to pride,
subject to anxiousness, empty echoed terror.
Toast with Diet Coke the McDonald’s regulars,
the cathedral regulars,
the Mozarts, the Manets, bankrupt Vermeer,
the pulsing maters, the buttermilk cups,
open arms, open legs,
the bell ringers and the rung bells,
the sleek-bodied, the weighted,
the glide and slide and blithe,
the large and loud and meek.
Round up the elect for the trains.
Lift the incense.
Light the tall candles,
the Easter candle before the tabernacle.
The mystery of faith.
Lift the morning sun through the rose window
and the saints with green halos
and the virgin with blue halo
and the baby with the halo of red.
Gather in the plaza the elect
for goats-and-sheep time,
each then by a different path to the same pasture.
Hymn the bricks and marble,
the dark basement, the ceiling, cracks,
the space like another cosmos.
Whither shall I go?
Count sins. Record errors and malignancies.
Keep track humanity.
Serve the chalice of soup-kitchen soup.
Break day-old bread, a leg unwell knit.
Mark each word.
Dog in the sanctuary.
Armor at the church door.
Turnips growing in rows under the pews.
Much barking at the altar.
Wake up, baby!
Open your eyes to the morning snow,
sunlight on the white city, a joyful demand,
on the streets and sidewalks,
factories and tattoo shops,
police cars and hearses.
Climb the column.
Sit on top and pray alone
for a novena of novenas,
eighty times eight.
The aroused, the aloud, the bowed
and unbowed, the cowed, the aground,
the bound and unbound.
Soon and very soon.
Let the barrio close you in awkward embrace
— smell the rot, touch the frail wood,
feel the play of texture in the ugly wood,
listen to the wind across the wood face.
Let us as elect wash the feet.
Let us chop up pews for firewood.
Let us recalibrate the statues
and the paintings and the hymnals.
Let us go out each morning as elect,
each noon, at night.
Let us go out and among
and in and with.
Toast with strong coffee
out and among and in and with,
sacred prepositions.
Holy grammar. Holy word.
Holy embrace, elect.
Patrick T. Reardon
Patrick T. Reardon, a three-time Pushcart Prize nominee, is the author of six poetry collections, including Salt of the Earth: Doubts and Faith and Puddin’: The Autobiography of a Baby, A Memoir in Prose Poems. His poetry has been featured in numerous journals such as America, Rhino, After Hours, Heart of Flesh, Autumn Sky, Silver Birch, Burningword Literary Journal, The Write Launch, Poetry East, The Galway Review, and Under a Warm Green Linden. In addition to his poetry, he has also written a history book titled The Loop: The ‘L’ Tracks That Shaped and Saved Chicago, which was published in 2020 by Southern Illinois University Press.
