July 2024 | poetry
Last Day of Magic
For example, when you take a funhouse
seriously, you’ll want mirrors to keep
the world inside the glass from falling out
like a labryinth into the future or the past
for all to see—the ceiling, the floor, the plywood
with splinters spliced into planks
that join the festival
moon with its halo of haze—
you’ll eventually want to stroll through
the mirrors and meet the clowns
unicycling along sawdust paths and juggling
seltzer bottles and bowling pins.
You’ll ask the coulrophobes, why not
dream of the funhouse
falling into a sideshow and a ring toss
and the never-ending carousel.
You’ll want to walk over to Water Street.
The Rotary Club will sell you a funnel cake.
Go ahead, try a mallet
at the Whac-A-Mole and walk
with the living folk into the haunted house
we keep filling up
even if we are a small town.
You’ll want to wait until 9 o’clock,
when fireworks blush the air over the canal works—
roman candles and parachutes, bengal lights and aerial shells
will rocket from the barge
sitting north of the locks.
Pretty soon the thought will strike you
halfway convinced that H.P. Lovecraft had lived here,
you’ll bet five bucks
he loved the cars idling under the bridge,
the winters when slush finally thawed
and earth gushed green and the canal
flowed and the young girls
with their melancholy eyes, opaque as the boredom
they wear like a prom dress,
filled the sidewalks
with bicycles and Segways. You’ll want to take
the path with the tourists
stepping back from skateboarders
crossing George Bailey Bridge,
where exactly 1,000 yellow ducks drop
into the algae-mottled canal
and you’ll want to gather with the rest of us
to cheer for the ducks racing
in what could be the world’s
slowest Derby or Preakness,
and you’ll remember it for a long time.
Myth and Fairytale
A friend once told me his wife
passed away without a mark— as if sleeping;
her body perfect, tranquil and slumped
as if telling a story
quietly to herself inside.
Before his wife died,
we already had ourselves
to see by candlelight in cold places,
where we were close enough
we often spoke.
I thought about that man
in the February of this year,
and his wife. Who’s to say I never
go back to the old stories
I thought I’d left behind.
The man whose wife died and I
spoke while driving
on an icy road going to church.
We found ourselves young enough once
to take in the comfort
of the snowy countryside.
Ours was a story that began
once upon a time. “Let’s go,” he said,
“let’s leave this cold February
and live our best life—
and he hung up the phone—
Bob Haynes
Bob Haynes lives in Seneca Falls, New York. His poems have appeared in North American Review, Nimrod, New Letters, Poetry Northwest, Rattle, Bellingham Review, Lake Effect, Poet Lore, Cimarron Review, Natural Bridge, Louisville Review, and Louisiana Literature, as well as featured on the Verse Daily website. Poems have also been reprinted in anthologies Cabin Fever (Word Words) and Kansas City Out Loud (BkMk Press), and in the poetry textbook Important Words (Boynton/Cook Heinemann). His latest book, The Grand Unified Theory (Kansas City: Paladin Contemporaries). He currently teaches online writing and visual rhetoric, and poetry workshops at Arizona State University.
July 2024 | poetry
Eagles changed their migration routes across Ukraine to avoid fighting and because their habitats were likely damaged or destroyed by war, say scientists. – BBC 22/5/2024
to pick an enemy is no easy matter.
there are no half-measures,
no fair-weather enemies.
your enemy will give birth to you all over again
with a promise to never disappoint you, never fail you.
to burrow inside you deeper than any love.
not so much an ill wind
as that other hand on the tiller.
friends can be false,
enemies cannot.
even eagles change course
to avoid the pas de deux of enemies torturing the earth,
the pitted earth where no mouse or rabbit runs,
where love is either one of two things
but never both at the same time:
we wing-less creatures of binary.
Justin Lowe
Justin Lowe lives in a house called “Doug” in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney, where, until recently, he edited the international poetry blog Bluepepper. His ninth collection, San Luis is due out through Puncher & Wattman in October of this year. He also has a novel doing the rounds of publishers and has also had poems set to music by bands such as The Whitlams and The Impossibles.
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
