October 2024 | poetry
I take in a terrific piano concert: classic
ragtime, boogie-woogie, rhumba-boogie
from New Orleans, a couple of blues numbers.
Professor Longhair tribute. A boogie version
of the national anthem; it never sounded better.
The pianist’s fingers blur; from his left hand
the bass rumbles like a train under the street.
Beside him a drummer sits on a box-drum
he beats time on, and
I’m grooving,
moving
my body all over along with the drumbeat;
doing a jitterbug
sitting down.
Big smile all over my face.
Keeping time with every beat. If only
someone else would stand and dance!
The Texas town that I moved here from, lots
of people would have been up and dancing—
in the aisles, down front, at the back, anywhere
there was room. Shouts and whistles
between numbers, hair and feet flying.
This Midwest audience: the woman next to me
wears a cautious smile. A couple behind me
peer studiously at the pianist. A few people
tap feet or joggle their heads. That’s it?
After each number, polite applause.
I’m totally frustrated! And damn!
That curly-haired drummer is so hot
perched there on his cajón
with his twice-pierced ears
and the stud at the side of his nose.
Lynn D. Gilbert
Lynn D. Gilbert’s poems have appeared in Arboreal, Bacopa Literary Review, Blue Unicorn (Pushcart nomination), Consequence, Footnote, The Good Life Review, Sheepshead Review, and elsewhere. Her poetry volume has been a finalist in the Gerald Cable and Off the Grid Press book contests. A founding editor of Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, she lives in a suburb of Austin and reviews poetry submissions for Third Wednesday journal.
July 2024 | poetry
when moonlight bathes the cold marble of your headstone,
do you cling to the echoes of old laughter?
what burdens sleep in the final exhale?
you, where the tiger lilies won’t bloom
and songbirds fill spaces we cannot see you go
can you tell me if a holy hand found yours adrift
in the currents of a starlit eternity?
or is your faith another fiction?
are my questions dandelion wishes,
seeds fallen where i find you
at the edge of all my doubts,
prayers i’ll never know you hear;
can you feel the ghost of my belief
memories of silence and empty spaces we cannot fathom?
do you know
when i find the flowers dead,
i think of you
Caitie Young
Caitie L. Young (they/them) is a poet and writer from Kent, Ohio, where they earned their MFA in Creative Writing from Kent State University (NEOMFA). Their work has appeared or is forthcoming in Puerto Del Sol, new words {press}, The Atlanta Review, The Sonora Review, The Minnesota Review, and elsewhere. They were the first-place recipient of the 2022 Foothill Editors Prize for best graduate student poetry and are a pushcart nominee.
July 2024 | poetry
Both of us were small, though she,
compliant, soft as white bread,
spent two years in Beginner Swim
for fear of ducking under water.
I’d bike downhill past her house,
where she nestled among four sisters
and brothers, my hands raised
from the handlebars, showing off.
That summer, I sheared Sharon’s
dishwater blond hair at her house,
though outside, away from May,
her harried mother who’d hustle
in seconds from basement to back
yard clothesline, from kitchen to
car port. My plan: to make Sharon’s
bowl cut chic, sleek.
Feeling professional, mature,
I used a spray bottle for styling,
finished with children’s scissors.
I still see Sharon seated on a chair
in her driveway, me standing
above her, both hidden behind
her father’s black Ford truck,
beige tufts sprouting from her head
like clumps of damp hamster fur.
I cried, though we both knew Sharon
would be fine. I was confined to
our house and yard, punished behind
an invisible fence, watched May fly
by in her station wagon, her kids waving
popsicle-sticky hands out the windows,
returning from the community pool.
It was not just my aloneness, my shame.
I felt my plans for summer, plans for
a brave, expansive life, each day
cut shorter.
VA Smith
VA Smith’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in dozens of literary journals and anthologies, among them: Southern Review, Calyx, Crab Creek Review, West Trade Review, and Quartet. Kelsay Books published her first and second poetry collections, Biking Through the Stone Age, 2022, and American Daughters 2023. Her manuscript, Adaptations, is slated for publication in 2025. Her poetry has been nominated several times for Pushcart Prizes. A former Liberal Arts Excellence in Teaching Faculty member at Penn State University, she is currently a staff member at River Heron Review, writing, practicing yoga, and home chefing. Learn more about Virginia’s work at vasmithpoetry.com, or on Instagram and YouTube @vasmithpoetry.
July 2024 | poetry
He did not say you were a crash survivor
Only that you postponed
Death
In an era between
Earth seconds
On a planet where
Hold-onto things
Shatter
And re-form, like something less human
More nimble
While the candy-store gangsters
And digital priests
Tell us otherwise
And so on, etc.,
When we returned in our sharp suits
We shed them,
our hot bodies tattooed, dotted,
like code,
Our old robes stained and dismissed,
lost to lovingly find gold and fight the fire,
your pockets were bulging, my son
and dry leaves in the wind outside a distance palace are twitching
or would you call it dancing?
while we need to waste another one,
and we need to try again
don’t think again about the birds and the prophets
especially the birds,
who have stopped singing their lovely songs about lesser dimensions
Joseph Charles Mollica
Joseph Charles Mollica is a writer originally from Queens, NY.
July 2024 | poetry
There is nothing more that we can do.
His mouth closed firmly like a window sash.
His face composed like laid brick.
Her every nerve thrumming.
His mouth closed firmly like a window sash.
Her fingers, face muscles, pudenda alert.
Her every nerve thrumming.
So it would be now.
Her fingers, face muscles, pudenda alert.
His cup, “World’s Greatest Dad” on his desk.
So it would be now.
No more tomorrow.
His cup, “World’s Greatest Dad” on his desk.
Her husband’s disembodied hand on her thigh.
No more tomorrow.
How will it be?
Her husband’s disembodied hand on her thigh.
The degrees floating on the wall behind.
How will it be?
There will be nothing.
The degrees floating on the wall behind.
The pores on his nose looming large.
There will be nothing.
And there is no God.
The pores on his nose looming large.
His white coat like hardened snow.
There is no God and
There is nothing more that we can do.
Elizabeth Hill
Elizabeth was a Finalist in the 2022 Rattle Poetry Contest, with her poem also appearing as Poem of the Day on February 20, 2023. She was nominated for the 2023 Pushcart Prize by Last Stanza Poetry Journal. Her poetry has been published in 34th Parallel Magazine, Boomerlit, SAND, and Catamaran, among other journals. She is a retired Administrative Law Judge who was responsible for suits between learning-disabled children and the school system. She lives in Harlem, NYC with her husband and two irascible cats.
July 2024 | poetry
Mural: St. Croix
A sailboat and its white hull floating on the water like a grimace or lopsided moon. How the banana daquiri’s implosions of flavor echoed on my tongue while the bartender stuffed a blender with five bananas for my 2nd. Tom and I. How our kayak-oars were conduits as we stuck them into waters aspark with bioluminescence. Squares of honey cake swelling with flavor. So many abandoned cars in the jungle and their decades of rust—a museum of automotive osteology. Eight fathoms down a wall of reef: the divemaster skewering a lionfish and the nurse shark’s path, vacillating maniacally like a soundwave, to claim it with his big-mouth snatch. How scuba collapsed the world I knew, like a theatre curtain dropping to reveal hallways of stages. Submerged parts of the pier’s pillars coated in reef—outgrowths of webbed rock and branches of staghorn coral grasping at schools that meander by. How most days people ask are you on your honeymoon and chuckling to each other, full of fourteen years. The blue of that ocean, impossible to recreate like something from a dream—as if blue were ethereal or majestic or supernatural—certainly not of this earth. A blue-I-couldn’t-believe and repeatedly blinked at, waiting for it to resemble a more familiar shade. 10 PM, in the kayak, falling back into Tom’s arms to stare upwards at a night that churned with sprays of stars, the ocean beneath us aswirl with glittering sediment, eager and alive.
Mural: Three years in Key West
Conchs everywhere but the beach. Bruise-blue crabs scuttling the estuary’s woods. The muse that is Key Lime Pie and each local chef’s interpretation realized in three-story displays of crust, tang, and fluff, peaked into mountain ranges burnt into the mallow. Mammoth iguanas straddling the prehistoric and domestic, clenching to branches of manicured bushes. A life-size cutout of Judy Blume. Frogs no bigger than croutons bounding on walkways, their translucent sacs of bodies pumping with tiny organelles. A high school with entirely outdoor passing periods. Our calicos discovering—reveling—in the back porch’s liminal space of sun and carpet. Plush algae affixed to boulders like thick, emerald embroidery on stonewash denim. Coy pelicans with that dreamy and bashful, blue-eyed gaze. My husband and I—how our love doesn’t abide entropy, gaining energy the longer we’re together. The sky ever-heaping in a stack of contrails as if a pile of bones on a blue x-ray. The massive, sapphire and yellow swimming heads of queen angel fish. Art galleries featuring kitsch-pop art full of unsubtle commentaries on an afflicted humanity. Colonial homes painted in egg-shell-varieties of blue or pink or yellow. That freakish amalgamation of stingray and crustacean realized in a scuttling horseshoe crab. A Hemingway cat’s fat-pawed grasp on my thigh, while sitting in the backyard of the writer’s famous mansion.
Courtney Hitson
Courtney Hitson holds an MFA in poetry from Columbia College Chicago and currently teaches English at the College of the Florida Keys. Her poems have appeared in numerous literary journals, including DMQ Review, Wisconsin Review, McNeese Review, and others. Courtney and her husband, Tom (also a poet), reside in Key West, Florida with their two cats.
