October 2019 | poetry
I can tell because they spill out from the chain hotel
and stare at my empty storefronts.
Scattered scooters knocked over on sidewalks decorating
my urban decay.
—the convention and visitors bureau is even more confused—
Like an alcoholic, I exaggerate with grandiosity
and defiance, repeating myself about urban emptiness.
Old-timers no longer lecture the new residents. Even
the giddiest of community boosters have quit salvaging
the scooters and scooping up trash, now that the
convention and visitors bureau sells my neighborhood
to meeting planners who prefer their banquet rooms
cheap and their reward points easy.
—you don’t need a scooter to go from the hotel bar
to the board meeting upstairs—
After 30 years in this town, do I continue to tell its story
through my own story? Do I wait for the 12th revitalization?
—or as Cavafy warned—
If I move to another town, will the dead scooters ever rise
from the sidewalk?
Gary Singh
As a working scribe, Gary Singh has published over 1100 works including newspaper columns, travel essays, art and music criticism, profiles, business journalism, lifestyle articles, poetry and short fiction. He is the author of The San Jose Earthquakes: A Seismic Soccer Legacy (2015, The History Press) and was recently a Steinbeck Fellow in Creative Writing at San Jose State University.
October 2019 | poetry
East Tennessee, an hour from the mines,
and Tuesdays, at the public clinic, I’m
buckled into full extraction mode.
My knuckles blanch on forceps
dug into blackened stumps
the meth mouth offers me.
Numb, his eyes twitch: More. More
of what collapsed him in the parking lot.
Blood wells up, ligaments let go.
He hardly moves as I bear down
and slowly, slowly turn out teeth like screws.
Off-days, my hands, clammy as a mist, float above
a keyboard: poetry at three removes from urgency.
Imagination is the act of sweeping clouds.
I inject inside a woman’s lip.
She’s reclined, head nearly cradled in my lap.
Her stringy hair droops across my knee.
“Why are your front teeth gone?”
I’m asking quietly.
“My husband caved in my jaw.”
If I lay crisp witness out,
clamber through these gullied woods,
will a mourning dove burst into view?
Who neither hears nor sees the whippoorwill?
A fresh scar rakes another woman,
starting in the scalp, across her eyelid, into
the pucker of a mid-cheek gouge.
To my surprise, her eye’s alive.
“What happened to you?”
“My boyfriend done come home on meth
and put my face through a window.”
Eric Forsbergh
Eric Forsbergh’s poetry has been published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, the Journal of Neurology, Zeotrope, The Cafe Review, The Sow’s Ear Poetry Review, and the Northern Virginia Review, which awarded him a Pushcart nomination in 2016. He is a Vietnam veteran.
October 2019 | poetry
I.
There’s a chance everything has been assumed incorrectly.
There’s a chance I’ve gotten it all wrong.
Misplaced the dangling modifiers.
Left decimals out of column.
Commas forgotten, and misfired chromosomes
flipping an entire species on its genealogical frontal lobe.
Prophets tried to warn.
Seers and shaman returned
carrying markers of indemnity, lived experience
suffered and survived, until now
becomes instinct, systemic acceptance
defining the limits of beauty and love.
II.
Compressing time compares
particle versus wave, proxy tunnels
navigating both like wormholes
linking process and form.
Conceptual technology owes its existence
to the human body, the internalized
network of firewalls, end-stops, cul-de-sacs
of private intentions needing protection
from fear of the anonymous hack.
Conjunction subordinates proper speech.
By all indications, pop stars leave the myth-
making to poets and teachers.
Take a straw poll of life’s greatest fears.
See how many answers feature
bridges and tunnels connecting us,
and all things.
III.
I carry weight around unknown,
height a cradle-fantasy of remembered baptism.
I am never smart enough to think like a foreigner,
an outsider accustomed to facing nature
in its raw nakedness, beauty balanced and awe.
Some tastes require jugular sweetness,
warm country tabernacles surrounded by thick night.
Preachers wed desire with a mother’s faith,
common metaphor saving its best for last days
of character-selling, shelter-space limited
to flesh and imagination.
IV.
Sanctuary splits me confused, me not smart enough
to skate across thin layers of meaning.
Not understanding but knowing the difference
between here and not here
simultaneously. Nowhere to be found
depicted in watercolors is too diluted
for aristocrats and the general
practitioners of the Sacred Arts,
the Primal Magic of self-doubt,
paranoia, and its shady base
of operations in poetry.
Patrons pay my expenses, photograph my receipts.
Desire allocates, critiques my inner algebra,
formulas setting parameter for stammer
too elastic to eliminate its brittle shell.
After questioning, beauty accepts
quiet comfort, knowing fear remains
the only modern ignorance left to eradicate.
Marc Meierkort
Marc Meierkort is a writer and educator who has taught high school English for 19 years. He is a graduate of Southern Illinois University at Carbondale (B.S.) and National-Louis University (M.A.T.), and he currently lives in Chicago’s suburbs. A Pushcart Prize nominee, he has recently had poems published by The Main Street Rag, Columbia College Literary Review, The Nassau Review, Inscape, and Spectrum.
October 2019 | Best of Net nominee, poetry
Sand is future glass, so get in the car,
fast-forward into the future, and stand
on the giant glass bridge of the beach.
We can listen to the waves while we stare
at the creatures frozen below, encapsulated—
there’s a crab mid-stride and there’s a plastic
cup. There will always be a band-aid, and we’re lucky—
the washed-up jellyfish is under glass—just
step right on it and laugh. Mostly there’s just rock, though,
and it’s too hard to sit on all day. Let’s take the car
to the diner and the past. Let’s stare out the window
and watch the fish bones and shells, glistening in the sun.
Danielle Hanson
Danielle Hanson is the author of Fraying Edge of Sky (Codhill Press Poetry Prize, 2018) and Ambushing Water (Brick Road Poetry Press, 2017). Her work has appeared in over 70 journals, won the Vi Gale Award from Hubbub, was Finalist for 2018 Georgia Author of the Year Award and was nominated for several Pushcarts and Best of the Nets. She is Poetry Editor for Doubleback Books, and is on the staff of the Atlanta Review. Her poetry has been the basis for visual art included in the exhibit EVERLASTING BLOOM at the Hambidge Center Art Gallery, and Haunting the Wrong House, a puppet show at the Center for Puppetry Arts. More about her at daniellejhanson.com.
October 2019 | poetry
odalisque #7 climbs out of the wall evicts me from the museum
odalisque untitled becomes very invested in her cuticles
odalisque #13 is detained in de gaulle international for the oil pastels in her purse so she
touches up her makeup in the airport bathroom & forgets her foundation inframe
odalisque (black eyes) spoke to me about the parts of the sky she had omitted
on Wednesday I find her bedrooming the beehives in the tree under my kitchen
odalisque #8 is still waiting for the moon to notice her back
Maya Salameh
Maya Salameh is a sophomore at Stanford University, where she is a member of the nationally ranking Spoken Word Collective and serves as the Inaugural Artist-in-Residence at the Markaz Cultural Center. She is a 2016 National Student Poet, America’s highest honor for youth poets, and has performed at venues including the Obama White House and Carnegie Hall. Her chapbook, rooh, is forthcoming with Paper Nautilus Press. Her work has been published in the Greensboro Review.
October 2019 | poetry
Blessed are those who cannot see
Or don’t believe in their sight
Or perhaps in vision altogether
For they shall be granted visions of what might be
Rather than what is
Or seems to be
A glut of nothingness
Random in its nature
That circumvents or ignores
The possibilities occurring
All around us
That don’t yet fit
Into a theory
Built
Upon the past
Josef Krebs
Josef Krebs has a chapbook published by Etched Press and his poetry also appears in the Bicycle Review, Burningword Literary Journal, Calliope, The Cape Rock, The Chaffey Review, Inscape, Mouse Tales Press, Organs of Vision and Speech, Tacenda, The Bohemian, Agenda, The Corner Club Press, Crack the Spine, The FictionWeek Literary Review, the Aurorean, Carcinogenic Poetry, The Bangalore Review, 521magazine, Former People, Grey Sparrow Journal, IthacaLit, New Plains Review, Inwood Indiana Press, Free State Review, Poetry Nation, Witness, and The Cats Meow. A short story has been published in blazeVOX. He’s written three novels and five screenplays. His film was successfully screened at Santa Cruz and Short Film Corner of Cannes film festivals.
