July 2023 | poetry
I expect the worst
always
even as a kid I expected birthday
presents I didn’t want, like another
loser Chutes and Ladders game
I expected a D on my spelling test
even though I was the best speller in the class
and today for sure my car will need new brakes
new struts, new tires, not just a tune up
for sure the grocery store will be
out of Meyer lemons and heavy cream
and my dessert will be a disaster
and the doctor will find
warts or high blood pressure or lung cancer
for sure the maple tree will fall on the house
in tonight’s high winds
and I will have to move to a hotel
I can’t possibly afford
and end up panhandling by Route 580
holding a cardboard sign in the pouring rain
as cars roar past
and drivers pretend not to see
but most of all I am worried my heart
is too stressed from all this worrying
and will pack up veins and arteries
and move to Wyoming
Claire Scott
Claire Scott is an award-winning poet who has received multiple Pushcart Prize nominations. Her work has appeared in the Atlanta Review, Bellevue Literary Review, New Ohio Review and Healing Muse, among others. Claire is the author of Waiting to be Called and Until I Couldn’t. She is the co-author of Unfolding in Light: A Sisters’ Journey in Photography and Poetry.
July 2023 | poetry
Let’s begin with memory.
How do you usually find yourself
returning to your past…
thrust back by crisis,
needing overdue explanations
and ready to demand them?
Or slowly, a sadness
beginning to make itself
painfully evident?
Or swept away by emotion
like a swollen muddy river
on its righteous way
to take over a town?
Maybe you simply wake up
foggy after a midday nap
filled with the vague idea
someone didn’t tell you everything.
Though if you are lucky,
maybe you are be transported back
by the taste of syruped pancakes
or the smell of a box of old books,
so that you are transported
to familiar happy images
once vivid but now a bit clouded
by your mind’s cataracts,
giving you a soft sense
that all that has happened is a gift.
Anne McCrady
Anne McCrady is a poet, speaker, and peace advocate. In addition to her award-winning poetry collections Along Greathouse Road, Letting Myself In, and Under a Blameless Moon, and her original parable Kevin & the Seven Prayers, Anne’s writing appears internationally in literary journals and anthologies. Anne’s work has also been presented as short film, art song, libretto, and liturgy. She is a two-time Pushcart nominee. Anne also has editorial, review, fiction, and creative nonfiction publication credits and is an active poetry contest judge and workshop presenter. Anne lives in Tyler, Texas. Her website is www.InSpiritry.com.
July 2023 | poetry
This morning when I walk out to the pool
two mallard ducks, one green, one flocked in blue,
float quiet ripples, unfazed by yellow
buses’ loud brakes, vested city workers
unfolding plastic gates before they dig
up asphalt, drop sweat, cough words down below.
Watching blue duck submerge its head below,
how many headless seconds might green pool
duck spend in its head, abandoned, lone, dig
deep is overrated, I call, bounce blue,
then whisper my wisdom: Don’t let workers
interrupt your peace, your time in yellow–
streaks angling the pool’s surface, some yellow
lantana shrubs waving roots from below.
Maybe later, after sun and workers
set home, you can open our side gate, pool
our ringed fingers, guide me out in dusk blue
when ducks become airborne geese, a flocked dig
escorting sunset clouds when oranges dig
in, a film’s filter turning you yellow,
aglow, I wish I was Dorothy in blue
joining you in technicolor, below
a spotless sky, fluorescent bricks, green-pooled
lily pads inviting us over the bridge workers,
probably in sepia, raised, workers
parched from last night’s storm, if only to dig
us up here, tonight, colored like the pool
table you played pre-shift, the bar’s yellow
signs dilating eyes as we staired below
campus town street, flags waving mascot blue.
That old, loud window fan, framed by chipped blue
paint, we “bravo-ed” our install, proud workers
we sweat sleeping uncovered, smoke below
from downstairs neighbors rose muted yellow
through makeshift vents, as we let our toes dig,
then cross air, our pores, veins, freckled gene pool.
I read about blue worn by those who dig,
serve, ancient workers still lost in yellow
scene, no pool repose, no silked hands below.
Amy S. Lerman
Amy Lerman lives with her husband and very spoiled cats in the Arizona desert where she is residential English Faculty at Mesa Community College. Her chapbook, Orbital Debris (Choeofpleirn Press, 2022) won the 2022 Jonathan Holden Poetry Chapbook Contest, she has been a Pushcart nominee, and her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Box of Matches, The Madison Review, Midwest Review, Radar Poetry, Rattle, and other publications.
July 2023 | poetry
I thought I was Li Po,
had moonwine midnight
feelin’ alright,
but my Mandarin was a nightmare
and all the trolleys stopped
at Harvard Sq. when it was still called
Peking, a long walk
down a dark hall, the door to out.
Oh, there was Jesse Colin
Young in the Fenway across
from the Gardner with its lost Rembrandt.
At the movies with Lara and Omar,
A Man and A Woman,
Juliet of the Spirits.
Is it any wonder then the grape jam
and Jif, the nasty PCP, horrific
spider plants, piano dances,
Mozart and endless drum solos.
You were gone in a flash, a screech of empty space.
Maybe a god hears the collisions, collusions
spontaneous combustions on the shy
trolley that speeds slow over the black
Charles living below.
That strap to hold on to,
the flat place to stand.
Everything looked obvious, solid
square like a windowpane, the street
outside melting like a Dali, this chair
from which there is no falling,
in the thinnest slit of morning.
Before ink, blood,
before blood, water, ochre
stick figures with spears
saying I love you in stone.
You were always somewhere.
I don’t know? Chicago?
Between us the wet
spot where I drew concentric
on your unrecognizable
abstract, Cubist, small, fantastic.
Michael Crowley
Michael Crowley is a retired English teacher living with his wife and cat in Cranston, RI. His poems contain bits of twisted nostalgia for his past, using scattered reflections, half-finished expressions, allusions to pop culture, partly developed images and enough odd humor to avoid sentimentality.
July 2023 | poetry
Unicorn and Pegasus sat down with the Queen.
Unicorn’s horn went somewhere obsc –
“Cream with your scones?”
Nice girls say please.
Knock, knock?
Who’s there?
Mother told me not to swear.
Knock, knock?
Go away, come again another day.
Knock, knock, knock.
Go away, nasty girls who want to play.
One has a phone; one has a knife.
One’s barely clinging onto life.
“Raspberry jam?”
Nice girls say please,
hide the bruises on their knees.
Knock, knock?
Who’s there?
I said, who’s there?
Nobody loves you; nobody cares.
Too many sweets will make you sick.
Mother call the doctor, quick, quick, quick.
Nobody loves you. Nobody cares.
Let’s push Pegasus down the stairs!
Sticky-sticky hands, covered in jam.
Simple Simon broke her hymen.
Mother call the doctor, quick, quick, quick!
He smashed her face with a candlestick!
Nobody loved her. Nobody cares.
Nice girls don’t meddle in others’ affairs.
Megan Cartwright
Megan Cartwright is an Australian college teacher and poet. Her work has appeared in Arteidolia Press, Authora Australis, Blue Bottle Journal, Meniscus Journal, October Hill Magazine, and oddball magazine. She also has poems due to feature in upcoming issues of Fatal Flaw, Tabula Rasa Review, MONO, and Quadrant Magazine.
July 2023 | poetry
Seventh Summer
A not so rare November day
that impersonates June,
bisque of sun,
Ligurian sky
when Sylvia, from the mailroom,
who walks with a cane,
/diabetes to claim
her right foot by spring/
joins me outside for a forbidden smoke.
Beautiful day, I say.
How do we make sense of it?
says Sylvia’s face
before casting alarm at the glaciers
melting in Alaska
and I share what I’ve heard
about the snow crab season
Cancelled, I tell her.
95% gone.
I can’t stop thinking of the fishermen, I say,
about to lose their livelihoods.
And all those people just being born,
she pines,
never knowing the sweetness of crab.
Delicata
Leo [the farmer] will die this afternoon,
forehead damp with kisses
from Gene [the tractor supplier]
and Dusty [the grower of feed corn],
queer but summoned gestures
from sturdy men
who talk with their hands.
Home remedies for Leo
meant the clench of his gut
metastasized
like the summer squash
in his tomato beds.
Goddamn volunteers.
We knew Leo from his blue eggs
and spiral notepad in his chest pocket
and honor stand on the side of the road.
Take what you want.
Leave your money in the jar.
He stood tightwire
on wood ladders to repair the plastic
of his hoop house with duct tape
and fed composting scraps
to a blind raccoon
[who stuck around].
Leo will die as so many farmers die,
shallow of air,
tallying from his bed,
wondering if he should have returned to church
all those years back
[when his wife begged him to],
the spent soil
of hundreds of thousands of fingerling potatoes
making rich, verdant crops
of his nails.
Christy Prahl
Christy Prahl is the author of the collection We Are Reckless (Cornerstone Press, 2023). A Best of the Net and two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, her past and future publications include the Penn Review, Salt Hill Journal, Eastern Iowa Review, and others. She has held residencies at both Ragdale and the Writers’ Colony at Dairy Hollow and is the founder of the PenRF reading series. She splits her time between Chicago and rural Michigan and appreciates subways and siloes in equal measure. More of her work can be found at christyprahl.wixsite.com/christy-prahl.
