July 2019 | poetry
My days are measured
By bottles of discount wine,
My weeks by clean linens;
Each morning
I seek salvation
in a cafe benison.
Sleep, sleep divine,
Why should eternal sleep
not be heaven?
For religion begins
Where knowledge ends.
My little fame in life,
I know,
Will be confined
to a freeway sign:
“Missing Elderly,”
numinous against
a gray morning sky,
Flashing, flashing, flashing
above a highway exit.
The door was closed
and did not open,
So how did the cat
go out again?
But remembering to floss
gives each day
a bright new meaning.
So knowledge ends
Where religion begins.
Italy’s third volcano,
what’s it called?
Not Etna or Vesuvius,
The one in the movie we saw?
I forget, though I should know;
And not Olympus,
with Hera and Zeus
and Jove.
For us mortals what does it signify,
purchasing stain remover
by the gallon?
Pessimism of drooled spaghetti
or long life’s delusive
grand ambition?
All hail Staphylococcus,
with my name on it;
Where fear reigns,
religion gains.
Dough, the financial guru says,
you’ll need ’til you’re ninety five,
or perhaps, I think,
to .38,
Or maybe I’ll rob a bank
or fail to pay my taxes
for a prison bunk
and hospital bed.
But what about the poor teller,
the cop
and the unlucky feller
who has to clean up the mess?
But hark!
The coffee grinder churns,
the espresso machine
still renders,
so why should I surrender?
Yea, verily, I declare
on my life’s embers
that where true knowledge ends
unyielding ignorance begins
and religion wins.
James Garrison
A graduate of the University of North Carolina and Duke Law School, James Garrison practiced law until returning to his first loves: writing and reading good literature. His novel, QL 4 (TouchPoint Press 2017), set in the Mekong Delta during the Vietnam War, has won awards for literary fiction and military fiction, and it was a Distinguished Favorite for the 2019 Independent Press Awards and a finalist for the 2018 Montaigne Medal. His creative nonfiction works and poems have appeared in online magazines and anthologies. Sheila-Na-Gig nominated his poem “Lost: On the Staten Island Ferry”‘ for a 2018 Pushcart prize.
July 2019 | poetry
(mornings are for suicides)
the way we dazzle
in confrontation with reality
oblong cornered cult in the sapped death dream
tonal physique of the prominent doom plume
like exposed cricks in fameless antiques
bird swarm in black-thought trees
come by clock : massive grave space
all properties of ovarian follicle and soft steel
winded legs sway like daisy stems
inhabiting concrete snares
now panhandling the rouge of creased cheekbones
pinched veils of late summer
petals
painfully
pallid gall of the lily flushed sour
like the whole furloughed town
that worked at the trainyard,
was shut down,
now there is no direction out
Jes C. Kuhn
Jes C. Kuhn is the author of three volumes of poetry, ‘Thigh Gap and the Vow of Poverty’, ‘American Sundays or pulling color from dead murals to paint living mirages’ and ‘The Penny Thief Sonnets’. His poetry, creative non-fiction and blog posts have been published in Corridors, Two Hawks Quarterly and Water~Stone Review, among others. He is currently enrolled in Hamline University’s MFA-Creative Writing Program. Kuhn lives, writes and teaches in Haunted, WI.
July 2019 | poetry
Swamp
is all about
quiet death
and the slow
cellular work
of decompostion
in a wet
dark place.
Say it. The word
itself, breaching
with that swishing
sucking, sibilant
swooping its
big wings
around an ample,
nasal-vowelled body
detonated by a plosive
that lifts
like a long-legged bird.
After the rape
of the three little
girls in the grass
by the Maoist
army, there was
no grass left.
Janet Joyner
Janet Joyner’s prize-winning poems have been honored in the 2011 Yearbook of the South Carolina Poetry Society, Bay Leaves of the North Carolina Poetry Council in 2010, 2011, Flying South in 2014, and in 2015, as well as anthologized in The Southern Poetry Anthology, volume vii, North Carolina, and Second Spring 2016, 2017, 2018. Her first collection of poems, Waterborne, is the winner of the Holland Prize and was published by Logan House in February, 2016. Her chapbook, “Yellow,” was published by Finishing Line Press in November, 2018. Wahee Neck, her third collection, will be published this summer by Hermit Feathers Press.
July 2019 | poetry
The explosion.
the earth bursts and curls
with february yellow. daffodils,
cruel colour
and abundant
in freshness and reds. we didn’t plant them –
the person who lived here
before us did – but still,
I’m glad
they’re there. drinking
from his coffee cup, summer
coming out of the ground
to surprise us,
tapping the windows
with a long thin hand;
the first spark
of a slow explosion,
set to expand
all year.
A sign of respect.
it’s a small cove,
and I stand at its center. wind crawls
the cliffsides,
cold as rivers
in high altitudes. and a river flows
at a low one
over to my left –
barely a stream, really,
though perhaps it was this
which cut the cove
at one time
out of rocks. I think
I think this way only
because today
I am in the company
of geologists. they climb over the cliff-face
and search for interesting seams. I
was mainly brought along
as a driver. me and aodhain,
showing them the countryside. but he
is a geologist also, and just as interested in rocks. I stand
with my shoes off
and watch the surf
as it grabs handfuls of sand
and collects crabs
like a commuter
bus-service. high on the dunes
a dolphin decomposes, dropped
in the last storm of autumn
and dragged up there – I guess as a sign
by someone
of respect.
it stinks salt
and dead seawater
and flies swarm the carpark. there were seagulls too,
flapping all over, until we pulled up and threw rocks at them.
DS Maolalai
DS Maolalai has been nominated for Best of the Web and twice for the Pushcart Prize. His first collection, “Love is Breaking Plates in the Garden”, was published in 2016 by the Encircle Press, with “Sad Havoc Among the Birds” forthcoming from Turas Press in 2019.
July 2019 | Best of Net nominee, poetry
All the students are sitting on the floor, so are several teachers,
even the principal. The visiting poet is sitting on a chair.
There are perhaps a dozen students — silent, serious, though
they exchange occasional knowing glances and smiles.
The visiting poet, too, is silent. So are four or five teachers
and the principal – the room soundless, except for exhalations
and the recorded message that harried them into this small room.
The room is the principal’s office and every available inch of floor
is occupied by the eighteen people summarily herded by the principal
into his inner sanctum. For once, the visiting poet is voiceless,
no well rehearsed lines on his lips, though his eyes take everything in.
The pre-recorded monotony of dread booms everywhere via the school
intercom — into every classroom, gym, washroom, office, stairwell.
This is a school lock-down.
Get into a classroom,
clear the hallways, or leave
the premises immediately.
The principal knows this is just a drill: a post-Columbine reality
of departments of education. His school has failed to measure up
in a previous time-trial at emptying halls, hence this repeat drill.
Teachers and students know the score. They know about the ominous
SWAT unit sweeping the halls for deranged gunmen and other such
non-conformists. Only the visiting poet is uncertain, wondering whether
he may somehow have inadvertently set all this in motion the moment
he set foot inside the school and headed towards the main office.
The principal checks his wrist watch again, giving it a shake as if to hasten time. The bored teens shift and re-shift their lank shapes as only teens can.
The teachers relax, their day now blessed by an extended recess.
The visiting poet muses on imagery inherent in the word lock-down,
its currency in prison language. Lockout, lockup, lock step, lock-box,
lock jaw, lock, stock and barrel. His mind spins combinations.
He has already noted the principal locked the door behind him
before sitting on the floor. It’s the first time the visiting poet has been
confined in a principal’s office – he reflects on the irony: it has taken
him almost a lifetime to achieve this rare distinction. He also realizes
that choosing to sit where he has, his head is the only target visible
above the window line. The poet has again made himself vulnerable.
The intercom monotony ceases as abruptly as it began. The principal
stands, thanks everyone for co-operating and this seminar of the silent
disperses. The pulsing din of academia bursts to life from the ashes
and in the visiting poet’s head metaphors ricochet everywhere,
as he now attempts to emulate the springy step of his nubile hostess,
trailing her down the now-raucous hall to where they await his poems.
Glen Sorestad
Glen Sorestad is a well known Canadian poet from Saskatoon, who has published over twenty books of poems. His poems have appeared in over seventy anthologies and textbooks, in publications all over North America, in many other countries as well and have been translated into eight languages.
