October 2018 | poetry
Abe:
Lives in the shadow of the Diner sign,
his bed a shadowy blue neon 24/7.
Ain’t nothin’ much in Ludlow—Abe
sells gas and gives directions to tourists
travelling the infamous Route 66.
Just over the tracks, the house where he was raised.
Main house and staff house, nary a window between
them both. He parks there sometimes,
watches the train through the ruined doors,
front and back frames open to the odd fox
creeping through.
Abe had his first proper kiss in that staff house.
It was spring, the dry ground blossom-rich
with yellow flowers, cholla standing straight
and proud as always. And Mary, a compass
of thought and feeling across her sunlit face,
knew Abe’s loneliness; she was a friend first,
lover second.
A sweet string of years, here and gone,
never forgotten. The streets go about their rhythms,
wind and weather mark the calendar, and every spring
the full moon bears the aching beauty of Mary,
her hand on his face as she kissed him one last time,
then boarded the train, the silhouette of her burning
through her thin flowered dress, lodging in his heart.
Running Uphill
She runs miles each day.
Even when the clouds are fraught
with snow. Even when the sun
shoots arrows through eyes.
She runs as if escaping,
and in truth, she is.
Demons from old struggles
follow from her days
to her nightmares.
A couple shots of Cuervo Gold
buys a couple hours
of dreamless sleep,
before it starts again.
Her choice of road rises
into foothills while dust devils
rake the desert floor below.
She climbs the distance
ravens climb. Cactus gives way
to fir, fir gives way to rock,
and still she runs.
A quick wind creases the air,
warns her to turn around.
Look at the horses already
reined in and protected,
the cottonwoods darkening
with oncoming weather,
not oncoming night.
Go home the voice in her says,
before the storm comes.
Runoff hustling over river stones
makes a good run a trackless
pick-your-path and don’t stop run.
Daytime fright with no tequila,
go home. So she turns back.
She is driven but not unwise.
She hits her door. The alarm clock
of the desert’s slow and seamless hours
explodes.
by Tobi Alfier
Tobi Alfier (Cogswell) is a multiple Pushcart nominee and multiple Best of the Net nominee. Her chapbook “Down Anstruther Way” (Scotland poems) was published by FutureCycle Press. Her full-length collection “Somewhere, Anywhere, Doesn’t Matter Where” was published by Aldrich Press. “Slices of Alice & Other Character Studies” was just published by Cholla Needles Press. She is co-editor of San Pedro River Review (www.bluehorsepress.com).
October 2018 | poetry
Instead of asking the young
why they leave, the town votes
for mannequins in cafe windows.
Just imagine, the mayor boasts,
if this works we can expand
to schools and church pews!
Some say they should polish
them like postcards. Others want
to be sure they don’t show skin.
Everyone agrees they’ll hum
all the old songs, never ask about
trans-fats or almond milk.
They won’t mine for better jobs,
jam distant cities into search engines,
jar dreams, wager change drawers
on highways and stuff potential
into overburdened hatchbacks. Never
will the sap of their ambition
fill the potholes of distant streets,
melt into the hearty ridges of
a thicker slice, or wake up full.
by Alison Terjek
Alison Terjek is an aspiring writer living in Northwest Connecticut. She has recently published poems in The Adirondack Review. She is a graduate of Western Connecticut State University and Park Nature Interpreter. She volunteers in her community, writes, travels and hikes whenever possible.
October 2018 | poetry, Pushcart nominee
The thing about Charlie Mingus Jr.—who clattered
onto the scene like a grand piano in a punch bowl—
is that he also was young once. More than that, fate
made him endure indignities that make a street bum
look like Reagan’s strapping young buck on food stamps,
savoring a T-bone. System so sullied even mobsters did
more than music critics, but you know, that’s entertainment.
I’m black, therefore I’m not: this is what four hundred years
of errors and trials—faith wrung out from unripened rinds—
forced folks with the nerve to be born neither wealthy nor white
to know from the get-go. And for the love of a stained-glass God,
don’t speak off-script or they’ll wash the mutiny from your mouth
with a firehose; that’s why most men lie down mutely in darkness,
safe or at least sheltered, beneath the underdog of hatred & history.
Get them to kill each other, or even better, hoodwink them
into hating themselves: that’s the anti-American Dream too
many citizens sleep through, fed a fixed diet of indifference,
intolerance, and interference. So what can you do if you know
you’re a genius, and all the klan’s men can never convince you
water isn’t wet? Keep rolling that rock up the hill until it grinds
a fresh groove into the earth: improvise your own force majeure.
This is almost my time, he said, and good God wasn’t he
more than half-right. I know one thing, (you can quote him)
I’m not going to let anyone change me. Overflowing with
awareness of himself, fresh out of the furnace, molded in
the image of a bird that flew first and further—mapping out
the contours of this new language: dialogic, indomitable—
his work exploded, a defiant weed cutting through concrete.
1957: five albums in twelve months—righteous waves
quenching a coastline, reconfiguring the world the way
Nature does. And his reward—a brief stretch in Bellevue,
ain’t that a bitch? Listen: when The Duke declared music
his mistress, he was lucky enough to need nobody, aware
that the genetic razor cleaving obsession and insanity is
capricious, like all those calamities Poseidon orchestrated.
Mingus was never not human, the impossible endowment
that drove him, destroyed him and, in death, restored him.
His tenacity was the heat that both healed and hurt, a comet
cursed with consciousness—he went harder, dug deeper,
even as his best work impended, yet-unrealized revelations:
Blues and Roots the brown man’s burden, a thorny crown
worn only by dispossessed prophets willing or able to testify.
His recalcitrant wisdom: earned the way trees acquire
rings: the reality of who he was, even if he too changed
at times, like the country that claimed him, mostly after
the fact. And whether you’re committed, an exiled crusader,
or a respectable suit working to death in squared circles,
the message from that rare bird’s song still resounds today,
an epiphany blown through the slipstream: Now’s the Time.
by Sean Murphy
Sean Murphy has appeared on NPR’s “All Things Considered” and been quoted in USA Today, The New York Times, The Huffington Post, and AdAge. His work has also appeared in Salon, The Village Voice, The New York Post, The Good Men Project, and others. He has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and served as writer-in-residence of the Noepe Center at Martha’s Vineyard. He’s Founding Director of Virginia Center for Literary Arts (www.thevcla.org). To learn more, please visit seanmurphy.net and @bullmurph.
October 2018 | poetry
Truncated Lives
Those millions who,
because of
color,
belief,
origin,
differentness,
hated
by imagination,
were chosen,
among all people,
to be example
forever,
of inhumanity
to fellowman,
castigated,
isolated,
in separation,
to die.
Me and Melanin
I’m known
for the slight amount
of melanin
in my skin.
In fact
I’m proud
to have so little!
SO pale!
YOU
are the opposite
of me
and have abundance.
I hate you.
I will enslave you,
hate you,
and kill you
for the melanin
in your skin.
by Duane L Herrmann
Duane L. Herrmann, is a survivor who lived to tell, and loves the pure light of the moon – and trees. He creates from his knowledge and experience. His collections of poetry include: Ichnographical:173, Prairies of Possibilities, and Praise the King of Glory. Individual work is published in Midwest Quarterly, Little Balkans Review, Flint Hills Quarterly, Orison, Inscape and others in print and online in the US and elsewhere, in English and other languages. He received the Robert Hayden Poetry Fellowship, the Ferguson Kansas History Book Award and nominated to be Poet Laureate of Kansas.
October 2018 | poetry
they will not be delayed
stare down the tick
tock clock
or will be extended
graciously
summer’s tufting breath
i opened my hand
where are you?
come here now and kiss sky
cerulean pale cornflower whips
of blackbirds
these clouds only wisdom
years ago
drink with me and dance
jig waltz rondo mazurka polka
adagio or allegro anything
that moves
this place is safe
nothing but goodness
can envelop us
my arms are open
but quickly before they aren’t
by Heidi A. Howell
Working loosely in the range of experimental/ language/Black Mountain/ NY School traditions, Heidi A. Howell has published poems in online and print literary magazines, including s/word, Psychic Meatloaf, The Eastern Iowa Review, Otoliths, la fovea, What Light, So To Speak: A Feminist Journal of Language and Art, and the Washington Review, which nominated her work for a Pushcart. She holds an MFA from George Mason University, Fairfax, VA.
October 2018 | poetry
Bat shit
abusive
now after
upside down
battered twins
fêted
fetid star
mellifluous
obsequious
arch flatterers
melancholy
clump of gay
clay oxymorons
amputated –plug
pulled on bouquets.
by Gerard Sarnat
Gerard Sarnat won the Poetry in the Arts First Place Award plus the Dorfman Prize, has been nominated for Pushcarts and authored four collections: HOMELESS CHRONICLES (2010), Disputes (2012), 17s (2014) and Melting The Ice King (2016) which included work published by Oberlin, Brown, Columbia, Johns Hopkins and in Gargoyle, Margie, Main Street Rag, MiPOesias, New Delta Review, Brooklyn Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, Voices Israel, Tishman Review, Suisun Valley Review, Fiction Southeast, Junto, Tiferet plus featured in New Verse News, Eretz, Avocet, LEVELER, tNY, StepAway, Bywords, Floor Plan, Good-Man-Project, Anti-Heroin-Chic, Poetry Circle, Fiction Southeast and Tipton Review. “Amber Of Memory” was the single poem chosen for my 50th college reunion symposium on Bob Dylan. Mount Analogue selected Sarnat’s sequence, KADDISH FOR THE COUNTRY, for pamphlet distribution on Inauguration Day 2017 as part of the Washington DC and nationwide Women’s Marches. For Huffington Post/other reviews, readings, publications, interviews; visit GerardSarnat.com. Harvard/Stanford educated, Gerry’s worked in jails, built/staffed clinics for the marginalized, been a CEO and Stanford Med professor. Married for a half century, Gerry has three kids and four grandkids so far.
