July 2019 | poetry
openmouthed, we grasp our children
this is what it means to start
from the beginning
shivering in one’s skin
what it means to start
a truce with face and form
soothing in one’s skin
the familial, a mother’s love
a truce without face forms
a dead son awash, the tiny body
familial (a brother) loved
now lifeless arms
dead son awash, a tiny body
to his mother still through gunfire
now lifeless, disarmed
on the corner by the playground
his mother still, though gunfire
crosses her son, the border (lengthwise)
on the corner, the playground
widens with neglect
cross with her son at the border
from the beginning
we widen with neglect’s
openmouth gasp, our children
Brenda Serpick
Brenda Serpick received her MFA in poetry from The New School and is the author of three chapbooks: ‘the other conjunction in it’ (Furniture Press), ‘No Sequence But Luck’ (3 Sad Tigers Press) and ‘The Female Skeleton Makes Her Debut’ (Hophophop Press). She was a participating poet for Tupelo Press’ 30/30 Project (July 2016), and her poems have appeared in Requited, Tule Review, The Potomac, Free State Review, eccolinguistics, Printer’s Devil Review, Spiral Orb, LIT, Lungfull! Magazine, and Boog City – among other fine journals. She currently teaches English and creative writing for Baltimore City Public Schools.
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
she hurts
she hurt
she heard
sheep herd
she purged
she pulled
she prayed
she pushed
she played
she paid
she laid
she lays deep in bed
she begged
she bled
she read
she sees red
she led
she is lead
she said
she shed
she shreds
she bred
she bent
she broken
she bruised
she awoken
she amused
she abuser
she abused
she confronted
she confused
she consume
she confess
she undressed
she less
she more
she a mess
she a mistake
she make
she take
she been taken
she was asleep
but now she awaken
Mary Ade
Mary Ade is a visual and textual artist based in Indiana. Her deeply personal work seeks to encourage vulnerability within herself and others.
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.
