Things I Still Want To Tell You

1

We were like slowly awakening pears,

lasting into winter, desert pears,

dry and ripening slowly.

During those last 3 years,

I learned to talk to you gently, you learned to listen,

to ask me about my poetry.

 

2

I think of you when there’s thunder out there,

but it still doesn’t rain.

The night it did rain, and the power went out,

we sat on your bed in the dark, talking of our childhoods,

46  years apart, how thunder

used to scare you, how daddy and you

would make love until the storm passed.

 

3

The other night, I bought fish and knew what I wanted:

you would have been proud of me, buying the way you used to buy,

asking questions, talking with the fish man–

I’m past 50, finally self-assured.

Think how much you could have taught me,

if you could have slowed us down with a kiss,

in the kitchen, in the store saying,

this is a strong fish, this one bakes or broils well . . .

 

4

Yesterday I put on the T-shirt that young Hillary

made for you with your name in bead letters;

I wanted to wear what had been yours next to my skin,

wear your name next to me all day.

 

5

Schooled in pain, but born to laugh at the same time,

I have a part of your smile,

and know how to do small stitches.

 

6

Having found you and lost you—

other deaths may be easier.

 

7

I keep your will, your leather wallet,

your bowl with the fine crack in it, your favorite knife.

The disappointments I wanted you to forget,

may they have been burned to condensed ashes, like many of your bones;

a year ago in snow, we sent you down the stream.

 

8

May what I should have said follow you,

may it knit you back together in transparency,

may the light shine through you,

may we go our separate ways in peace,

may we pass in deep silence, Mother.

 

 

Mary McGinnis

Mary McGinnis, blind since birth, has been writing and living in New Mexico since 1972 where life has connected her with emptiness, desert, and mountains. Published in over 70 magazines and anthologies, she has also been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She has published three full-length collections: Listening for Cactus (1996), October Again (2008), See with Your Whole Body (2016), and a chapbook, Breath of Willow, published by Lummox poetry contest (2017). Mary frequently takes part in poetry readings in Santa Fe and Albuquerque, New Mexico and is available upon request for readings and poetry workshops.

Carlos Andrés Gómez, Featured Author

Intersection

 

I.

He looks like a more drunk, shorter Santa Claus, minus the charm & good cheer

except he’s got a fresh gash under his left eye that’s bleeding Christmas red & every word from his mouth is buckets, & I mean buckets, of cheap fifths of gin. This white homeless man, first asking then demanding a dollar from me & the woman I love in front of the pharmacy on the corner of 8th & University. I raise my hand, silent apology offered

as we move toward the door to find a birthday card for a friend. It’s people like you,

he says, catapulting his five-foot-four-and-a-half-inch frame into a monument of self-

righteous fury, and I’m talking to YOU, he barks the spit-laced words, calloused index finger nearly touching the raw umber hue of my fiancée’s clenched jaw—You’re not even

human, he says, you fucking monkey.

 

II.

I knock him the fuck out—feel the sting

in my index & middle knuckles, relish

that crunch from when I sledgehammered

 

his jaw. His face becomes Mr. O’Reilly

telling me to stay out of trouble when

I came back to visit freshman year, it

 

becomes the mutiny of my body on

a dark street passing a man in a low-

pulled hoodie, it becomes my father’s

 

slight accent & my fifth grade friends

who giggled whenever he said the word

womens, it becomes my deeply buried

 

relief at knowing a cop protects me,

the time I carried my drunk hallmate

home in college, held her hair back

 

while she threw up for three hours, how

a hallway of mostly white faces still

assumes I fucked her.

 

III.

When I write the story

in my head, I am always

 

the hero. In the old ones,

I was always the victim.

 

IV.

I easily have twenty pounds of muscle on this dude, not to mention

thirty years, seven inches, & one less extended tour at war—

 

not to mention enough light-skinned privilege of my own, enough

class benefit-of-the-doubt. I could pummel him into a coma

 

with a gang of NYPD officers nearby, explain why & have them chuckle,

nod, & say, Don’t worry, pal. We get it. Just clean up afterwards.

 

V.

He follows us, my love in tears, as she retreats into the closest aisle.

I turn & face him: You just called my future wife a ‘monkey.’ Why?

You’re better than that. Imagine someone said that to a person

you love. And his eyes suddenly arrive—no longer

in Vietnam or his uncle’s basement in fourth grade chained

to a radiator or three decades’ worth of park benches—histrionic tears

start to drown the haphazard whiskers on his ruddy cheeks, as he pulls

sheets upon sheets of stolen frozen crabmeat from his tattered backpack,

his arms extended to her, offering them up as penance. The irony,

the allegory of this white man offering cold seafood to a Black woman

with a shellfish allergy.

 

VI.

A broken man has bullied the woman I love & anything I do will make me his bully.

I ask her, What would Darnell or Maurice do? What would Dr. King do? What would a ‘good man’ do? What should I have done? And again, the world demands answers from her but then mutes her response, silent as her voice in this poem, asking her to answer for something she has never owned nor sought. She’s between sobbing & punching the next man who talks, trying to busy her hands with Hallmark cards she can’t read through tears.

 

I imagine the scenario again, except this time while holding the hand of our six year-old

daughter & I am convinced that what just happened was either the bravest or most cowardly thing I have ever done.

 

VII.

I lie awake until we finally talk – she’s angry still,

the ache fresh as the gash on that hobo’s left cheek:

 

Honestly, fuck your social worker bullshit. He was

more important to you than me.

 

But, baby, what was I supposed to do? Beat his ass? What would that have done?

 

I don’t know, she says, I guess sometimes our options are only what is

least wrong.

 

 

Alive

  

At rest upon a body

of water without life

 

at the bottom of the earth

wedged between two peaks

 

in the middle of the Middle

East,    serene resort

 

in the midst of a cluster

of ubiquitous crisscrossing

 

wars that are now just

landscape: two bodies

 

learn how to float  again

for the first time. Two

 

best friends. Close

enough to the end to no

 

longer keep track of hours

or days. They carry

 

nearly two centuries

of stories and losses

 

and secrets between them

into this stinging cold

 

that refuses to let them

sink. Each refusing

 

to release the other’s

arthritic grip, knowing

 

they came here today to

let go—and so the lake

 

becomes a sea of schoolgirl

giggles hijacking their hoarse

 

throats, now laughing as

their scars make them

 

into glowing quilts beneath

the sheen of heavy salt. I see

 

only them in this sacred

pool that is closer to hell

 

than any other, called Dead

because nothing is able to

 

survive its grasp for too

long and yet here they are:

 

two old ladies   who’ve defied

death                       rejoicing.

 

 

Carlos Andrés Gómez

Carlos Andrés Gómez is a Colombian American poet and the author of Hijito, selected by Eduardo C. Corral as the winner of the 2018 Broken River Prize. Winner of the Atlanta Review International Poetry Prize, Fischer National Poetry Prize, Lucille Clifton Poetry Prize, and the Sandy Crimmins National Prize for Poetry, his writing has been published, or is forthcoming, in the New England Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, The Yale Review, BuzzFeed Reader, The Rumpus, Rattle, CHORUS: A Literary Mixtape (Simon & Schuster, 2012), and elsewhere. Carlos is a graduate of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.

Up Shit Creek

Up shit creek (and assuming you stick with the
traditional story line) without a paddle. An ineffable
disaster, you surmise.  Yet, it could be worse.

Suppose you no longer even have a canoe
and your only apparent option is to swim back
down this dystopian stream of sludge? Or worse

still, what if you’ve never managed to master the
art of swimming?  But, not to worry. According to
the teachings of the dharma, all things in life are

impermanent, invariably subject to change. And
with the law of gravity in play, wouldn’t the
effluvium eventually begin to flow downstream?

Thus, if you stay right where you are, the upper end
of the creek might well begin to clear and those at the
low end of the runnel would be the ones with a problem.

So, keep the faith, friend.  Between the wisdom of the
Buddha and Sir Isaac Newton, it just might be that your
luck is about to change.

 

Howard Brown

Howard Brown is a poet and writer who lives in Lookout Mountain, Tennessee. His poetry has appeared in Burningword Literary Journal, Tuck Magazine, Blue Collar Review, The Beautiful Space, Pure Slush Magazine, Poetry Super Highway, Old Hickory Review, Lone Stars Magazine, Printed Words and Devils Party Press. In 2012, he published a collection of poems entitled The Gossamer Nature of Random Things. His poem “Pariah” placed first in the poetry division of the 2015 William Faulkner Literary Competition sponsored by the Union County Mississippi Heritage Museum and Tallahatchie Riverfest. He has published short fiction in Louisiana Literature, F**k Fiction, Crack the Spine, Pulpwood Fiction, Extract(s) and Gloom Cupboard.

The Farmers Market Contemplates my Skull

“It is a vestibule introducing one into the presence of the Good. Vestibule? Yes, and vestige, too, the trace in the multiple of the Good which itself remains in absolute unity.” Plotinus, The Intelligence, The Ideas, And Being

 

Not whole, but wholly striving, this Somali sambusa

confiscates

my taste buds. The way its lentil skates

toward higher stakes with kombucha

 

dominates the echoes and mirrors

of the Radiohead

cover band’s striving. Running for cover, we head

into the nearest tent; whatever echoes and mirrors

 

the rain is handmade

or not for sale in here. The scent of a baker’s

cake comes in and offers me its handsaw when my Baker’s

cyst elicits memory’s handmaid.

 

Fliers for performances of The Comedy

of Errors litter

the eye with glitter

redivivus, cupbearers and community.

 

For the essence of spiritual CBD

oil – if the expression is permissible –

Corri’s turquoise Hamsa charm fits the bill

to a t.

 

They call this pinot

“Moonlight in a Nightie.”

Running for cover with impunity,

blue jays point –

 

by the grace of God – to hardy fuchsias.

A sobering and drunken wind’s companion

anions

break this Saturday into a million cluster fucks.

 

But for all that, the Elf King’s roastery

clouds the thousand eyes of death, whose motley crew

of semi-arbitrary forces in J. Crew

will have a pretty good story

 

after today. Sitting tight, last year’s regatta

queen considers last year’s gold rush,

crying in her lap with thrush,

and sips a microbrew until last year’s forgotten.

 

“Beauty must forget itself to be itself”; a misbegotten

thought, which thinking, thinks, “Your rage agrees

with you, and rages.” By the grace

of this harissa’s miniature toccata

 

on my tongue,

gap-toothed memory gets around,

brings out the best bratwurst in the lost and found.

Angry it isn’t ideal, a scaredy-cat’s got my tongue.

 

Jake Sheff

Jake Sheff is a pediatrician in Oregon. He’s married with a daughter and six pets. Poems of Jake’s are in Radius, The Ekphrastic Review, Crab Orchard Review, The Cossack Review and elsewhere. He won 1st place in the 2017 SFPA speculative poetry contest and a Laureate’s Choice prize in the 2019 Maria W. Faust Sonnet Contest. Past poems have been nominated for the Best of the Net Anthology and the Pushcart Prize. His chapbook is “Looting Versailles” (Alabaster Leaves Publishing).

Emily as an Echo of Old Music

Rarely do we tear off a wing

from our past bodies to feel alive

with each other, but it happens

 

enough that we need

some real wolves in the music

we listen to when the children

 

are sleeping.  I sing to howl

without the substances

of our first life together.  Emily,

 

she likes to close her eyes

& stand alone in the water

of her love for me.  It’s a new

 

distance.  We are dancing bears

that cannot understand

how we found our hind legs.

 

We are so many animals

that I do not understand

how these songs keep finding us.

 

 

Darren C. Demaree

Darren C. Demaree is the author of eleven poetry collections, most recently “Emily As Sometimes the Forest Wants the Fire”, (June 2019, Harpoon Books). He is the recipient of a 2018 Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award, the Louis Bogan Award from Trio House Press, and the Nancy Dew Taylor Award from Emrys Journal. He is the Managing Editor of the Best of the Net Anthology and Ovenbird Poetry. He is currently living in Columbus, Ohio with his wife and children.

Andy Posner

A More Perfect Union

 

When children by gunfire die,

When the dreamer and the warden clash,

 

When statues betray the artist, we say

This is not who we are.

 

Who are we?

 

I take my chisel to Plymouth Rock

But the rock gives no blood;

 

Our history is like that stone,

Heavier than its weight…

 

Stood at a dank underpass, I rattle

A tin cup, wave a sign that reads

 

This is not who we are—

 

I can grow rich here, devote my life

To the pursuit of happiness…

 

It is said that upon his murder, Lincoln belonged

To the ages: Why do we wait for blood?

 

We’ve planted great forests of headstones.

I wander their lush paths, the sanguine streams,

 

And amidst this grandeur, this horror,

I glimpse both what is and what could be.

 

 

 

What of the Future?

 

I’ve been hearing Save the Rainforest

Since I was small enough to sleep

In the safety of my parent’s bed

Or snuggled with stuffed animals—

Pandas, giraffes, monkeys, frogs;

Since I lived for lullabies and storytime;

Since the world was as small as a crib

And as big as my imagination;

Since a nightlight could douse fears

And a drop of Tylenol could erase pain;

Since adults could assure me

That all was well and would always be well.

 

Now I hear that 20% of the Amazon is lost,

That the remainder is on fire,

That a tipping point may soon be passed—

All life in peril.1

 

Now I have a beloved wife, toddler, dog—

Great plans for our lives.

Now my parents are older, frailer.

Now, at thirty-four, I have traveled enough of life

To know that adults have always betrayed their children,

That absent drastic change I, too, will betray my child,

And that without a future for him

There can be no real joy or pleasure in the present.

 

1 Fisher, Max. Aug 30, 2019. NY Times. ‘It’s Really Close’: How the Amazon Rainforest Could Self-Destruct <https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/30/world/americas/amazon-rainforest-fires-climate.html>

 

Andy Posner

Andy Posner grew up in Los Angeles and earned an MA in Environmental Studies at Brown. While there, he founded Capital Good Fund, a nonprofit that provides financial services to low-income families. When not working, he enjoys reading, writing, watching documentaries, and ranting about the state of the world. He has had his poetry published in several journals, including Burningword Literary Journal (which nominated his poem ‘The Machinery of the State’ for the Pushcart Poetry Prize), Noble/Gas Quarterly, and The Esthetic Apostle.

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