April 2017 | poetry
They were
j u m p i n g
rope
double dutch
they called it.
two skinny
black girls
with legs the
size of
toothpicks
and mouths
that could be
heard from one end
of the block
to the other
and I wondered
What it would be
like
to have
a sister.
Karamo Muchuri Sulieman
At age 61, I am a mature African American poet who has written several hundred poems and published at least 100 of them. I received Honorable Mention in the 1999 Mellen Poetry Contest, for a 100+ page poem entitled Black Roses. I have also published in numerous magazines; journals and anthologies; among them San Fernando Poetry Journal; International Society of Poets; American Academy of Poets; Noble House Poetry collections and others. I also have one published work entitled Seasons.
April 2017 | poetry
The night was yellow. A city of light bulbs, ready to blow out. At the top, the Ferris wheel stopped sharply with a rust-covered clank heard across the park, and a woman screamed. Couples held hands a little tighter. A white-bearded man with missing teeth said it was the end of the world.
Meredith Boe
Meredith Boe is a writer and editor residing in Chicago. Her fiction and nonfiction has appeared in Midwestern Gothic and Mud Season Review, among others. Her critique has appeared in World Literature Today, Chicago Book Review, and Chicago Stage Standard. She sometimes writes poems on a typewriter at events around Chicago with the poetry-on-demand group, Poems While You Wait.
April 2017 | poetry
It comes to me in the watch museum.
It’s weights, hammers and gears.
Action, reaction.
The thud of an escapement.
The dominoes of a story.
I stand inside a pocketwatch
and lose myself to inevitable design.
A plan well engineered
leaves nothing to emotion but the joy
of cog after cog, falling in track,
ticking toward the unalarmed achievement
of another hour struck. Zen empty time.
Our story is like a watch,
weights, hammers, gears.
Little gears for instant gratification,
Huge gears that circle in years with minute changes.
And I know that your actions are reactions,
along a path which matters like another hour struck.
Nothing personal.
Wren Tuatha
Wren Tuatha’s poetry has appeared in The Baltimore Review, Pirene’s Fountain, Loch Raven Review, Clover a Literary Rag, Driftwood Press, Five 2 One Magazine, Autumn Sky Poetry Daily, Digges’ Choice, and the anthology Grease and Tears. Wren and her partner, author/activist C.T. Lawrence Butler, herd goats on a mountain in California.
April 2017 | poetry
1
Returning to their home town after 25 years
was surreal. They got lost trying to get to
the high school. The ice cream stand they worked in
was now a dry cleaners, while Old Smith’s Farm
was gone altogether.
2
Looking at the photos posted by George
the old swimming hole back home is now a fancy
water park with diving platforms and a wave pool
and roller coaster slides such a blight on that old
small town charm and I think I’m going to cry.
3
Contrasting today’s summer of yardwork
house repairs, car troubles and no money
with his youthful summers of dating, swimming
ice cream stands and summer stock theatre makes him sad
with longing and knowing you can never go home again.
Michael Estabrook
Michael Estabrook is retired. No more useless meetings under florescent lights in stuffy windowless rooms, able instead to focus on making better poems when he’s not, of course, endeavoring to satisfy his wife’s legendary Honey-Do List.
April 2017 | poetry
Hymn for Plenty
I believe in keeping what I want,
in dropping everything,
the briny taste of the sunset
yolking the raw meat of the trees.
I believe in throwing the baby out,
the jimson weed rolled tight,
waiting for moonlight, for a smoke,
a lithe trellis to tendril the air.
I believe in leaving it all unfinished.
It cannot be a deity until we make it
a deity, so nobody say a thing
about the wicked wisteria this year.
Something empty is something else
full, faithless, sunflowers
no longer turning away from shadows
to the light at the fencerow’s edge.
Miracle Pine
—after the Tohoku Tsunami
It survived the mess,
suspended over the splintered houses,
a last green asterisk to the Wave,
but then died shortly after.
I hear the townspeople plunked
a concrete likeness down in its place.
By god we find our ways to bring things back,
telling ourselves it takes a disaster.
An industrious bunch, we waste no time
fitting our handles to our little thumbs.
We get to work.
We blast, maim, pierce, and gut
to resurrect what we think should always be.
We fricassee and freeze out.
Afraid, we hang, starve, segregate, assimilate.
We neoliberalize and racialize—
memorialize, legislate, whitewash,
waterboard, roast, infect.
But most of all, we just make hay.
In fact, a man right now out the window
in the cold March will not yet give up
jackhammers some sidewalk into oblivion,
dreaming of his old neighborhood.
James Everett
James Everett has lived and taught English as a Lingua Franca for over fifteen years in the United States, Belize, rural Japan, and Malaysia as a Fulbright grant recipient. The people, languages, and landscapes of these places have led him to an inordinate love of international grocery stores, where Daniela, his daughter, Tania, his spouse, and he lose themselves for hours whenever their budget allows. Their kitchen smells of assorted fermented pastes, boiling daikon, patacones, tortillas from an old family recipe, Ecuadorian caldos, and popcorn they raise themselves in a community garden. Over coffee cups of pilsner and guayusa tea, they celebrate journals that have kindly published James’s work: the Evansville Review, Alimentum, Unsplendid, The Cortland Review, and many others.
April 2017 | poetry
Contemplate the smooth
surfaced speech,
frisk the word,
stride, run,
fall to overhear
the dried rustle,
a keyboard presses itself.
The bell rings,
the cat wafer,
arid pudding,
drive deep
on the artery,
jelly rushes
out from the bush,
clings, map to life.
The tones,
metronome tink,
how do I call for you?
a word fitted freshly,
airy curtain pounding,
fathered
ensnared
collecting crossroads.
Names are myths
to be released,
wrench them out,
feet hang on
the wooden floor, the
painted oaks spoiled,
elusive reed
rubbing the tip,
may the licorice cup
cease to be called,
thumb strikes
a calling in, a lift
a touch,
a noise
litmus
by extraction.
Afternoon proceeds
itsy bitsy gray reflections,
antsy dots settle
preserve or react
the froth,
name of some
road
on tired eyes.
the vital spirit.
Benedict Downing
Benedict Downing has written fiction, poetry since his adolescence. He joined local community reading circles, workshops, college literary groups, and ventured into his own. Has published in literary journals like Poetry Life and Times, Danse Macabre, Belleville Park Pages, Crack the Spine, New Plains Review, and The Sentinel Quarterly. He is currently working in his second novel, and other projects. There are two published books written by Mr. Downing. A poetry book “Sidereal Reflux” (2011) and a novel “Epicrisis” (2014).
