July 2016 | poetry
My student sits in the armchair facing mine.
He seems to listen raptly as I babble on,
losing control of my syntax: my words
spool forth, but lose their interconnections,
as with rising dismay I realize
I have no idea what I’m talking about.
No, that’s not quite true: I have an idea,
a good one, but as I start to speak,
it goes out of alignment—it forks in two, and then
the forks fork, and I think of the two roads
diverging in a yellow wood, and the old trickster
who slyly let on that you couldn’t tell them apart,
meaning, I suppose, that we kid ourselves
if we think we know what we’re doing
when we choose one path over another,
which I realize I am actually saying aloud
to my student, who clearly hasn’t a clue
who the old trickster is, or why I am talking about him,
or what the hell point I am trying to make,
when all at once I remember sitting across
from my old mentor, long since dead,
who had mumbled with smug incomprehensibility
what I assumed, because of his advanced age,
were profound and timeless revelations
(though in fact he was twenty-five years younger
than I am today). Wouldn’t you think that by now
I had realized that I had hopelessly confused
the poor kid, and that I would have the sense
not to add my irrelevant memories
of that disagreeable pontificator?
Wrong. I’m off on a new tangent, complaining
of ancient trauma the old coot had inflicted on me,
the same I am surely inflicting at this very moment
on the polite young man who sits across from me,
respectful and demure, deftly concealing
any private thoughts he must be having
about the deteriorating mentation
of the well-meaning, logorrheic, pompous
old gentleman happily blathering away.
by Victor Altshul
My poetry book, Singing With Starlings, was published by Antrim House (2015), and several of my poems have been featured in the Hartford Courant. I frequently attend monthly chapter meetings of the Connecticut Poetry Society and meet with other poetry organizations throughout Connecticut. I am a graduate of Harvard University and Yale University. Throughout my life I’ve run twenty marathons, sung various baritone roles in numerous operas, and rowed in the Head of the Charles Regatta along with other prominent regattas. I currently work as a psychiatrist with a continuous private practice since 1967.
July 2016 | poetry
The white school house, covered with years of coal dust, looks so much smaller now. A rusty flag pole, white when it adorned, lies among the busted mine machines that cover the grounds once for play. The mine gone, the coal trucks only noisy ghosts in my mind, can I have lived here?
Its little flat spot up against the steep land of the hollow where it came to be, my place to learn and grow back then. Marbles at recess, oral book reports to a room with two grades, and the growling gray trucks, humped with coal, that passed all day.
Broken windows, like eyes that only light can see, sadly look my way. And a missing door with only night beyond seems to say, “Oh yes, I loved you then. I am not so bad. Look at you now.”
by Charles Hayes
Charles Hayes, a Pushcart Prize Nominee, is an American who lives part time in the Philippines and part time in Seattle with his wife. A product of the Appalachian Mountains, his writing has appeared in Ky Story’s Anthology Collection, Wilderness House Literary Review, The Fable Online, Unbroken Journal, CC&D Magazine, Random Sample Review, The Zodiac Review, eFiction Magazine, Saturday Night Reader, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, and others.
July 2016 | poetry
Cruel April, February crueler yet:
Weary end of winter dark persisting,
The shortest month drags long along
Exhausted banks of brick-red mud-stained snow,
Crocuses entombed in superseding snowdrifts;
Spring robins held at bay by croaking crows.
The wind increasing, dark, and groundhog cold,
All to mock December’s bargain that the gleam
Of solstice bonfires will hasten back the sun.
I remember how the old Norwegians
Used to scoff away the icy clutch of winter dark:
“If you make it through December, you’ll live another year.
You’ll hear the meadowlark at Easter, smell the new-mown hay in June,
Drink chilled wine midsummer and savor in the harvest feast,
Celebrate midwinter’s night and dance the New Year in.
Take comfort in our promise and smile away your tears,
If you make it through December, you’ll live another year.”
As winter drags on deep and drear
From windblown snow to cold and clear
With icebound stars and frost in rings around the moon,
The sun a distant glimmer no warmer than a frozen rock,
And dark, the goddamned unrelenting dark, enduring,
Do not despair, but build again the bonfire in your mind.
Recall the solstice bargain and its promise through your fears,
If you make it through December, you’ll live another year.
by Michael Patrick Emery
Michael Patrick Emery’s poetry collection, Ask the Mad Poet: Observations From My Homeland in a Time of Convoluted Realities, was published in 2015. His poetry has also been published in The Zuni Mountain Poets: An Anthology, Schuylkill Valley Journal, Grey Sparrow Journal, Sanskrit Literary-Arts Magazine, Crack the Spine, Westview, and Querencia. He has a bachelor’s degree in psychology and philosophy from Occidental College and a doctorate in clinical psychology from Teachers College at Columbia University. Now semi-retired from his career in forensic psychology, he lives near the small artist colony of El Morro and is fortunate to be able to read most Sunday mornings with the Zuni Mountain Poets.
July 2016 | poetry
The evening beryl blue
A wavy horizon puffing out clouds
Sanguine in her lasting coffers
My heart lies silent at the bottom
Of the jar of peace.
Ears lounge on sand,
Coarse as they may be
Toting cottony waves
And their aimless niveous roars
The wind lifts my hair
Levity sinks in the sand
A shell upturned, burnishing a golden
Corals stray awash unshapely
Yet their randomness beholds a design
Woven in the blindness of foaming waves
Warily retreating into the belly
Of the gurgling sea
I lift my chin, scan them accede
My sights lock as colors riot deep
Into my fist wet sand intrude
As my toes surrender deep
A sombre wave romances my chin warm
Then rushes to bathe my dazed soul
That time too shall come
When my ashes they douse
Harboring them in their sojourning fold.
by Sudha Srivatsan
Sudha was born and raised in India. Her work has appeared in numerous journals including Commonline Journal, Tower Journal, the Germ Magazine, Carcinogenic, Indiana Voice Journal, Bewildering Stories, Leaves of Ink, Mused Literary Review, Subterranean Blue, Corner Club press, BlazeVox among others. Her work was also selected to be part of Storm Cycle’s 2015 Best Of anthology.
July 2016 | poetry
Curving, climbing, descending
On steel tracks, the moon keeping pace,
While in ten thousand little towns
The sleepers sleep in the earth.
In ten thousand furious days,
Men, machines, explosives
Blast through the mountains,
Hard labor building highways: The age
Of the motorcar has come and must
Be accommodated. But there are
No real rules yet, and whether
In a plush Pullman smoking car or a flivver
In a field, men will hop up, pulling
Long and deep from jugs of corn whiskey.
The ten thousand days diminish one
By one, and trains, men, swaying,
Drunk, join the sleepers of the little towns;
Sleep, while mountains and fields
Shift and change from what they once
Knew them to be, and cannot, even now,
In their stertorous breathing, imagine
The stranglehold to come.
by Christopher Kuhl
Christopher Kuhl has been published in Big Muddy, Crack the Spine, OVS Magazine, Euphony, Prairie Schooner, The Anglican Digest, Ensemble Jourine, Inscape Magazine, Kane County Chronicle, Mississippi Literary Review, Piedmont Literary Review, Zzbaggins Poetry Victims, Schuylkill Valley Journal of the Arts, Thin Air Magazine, Tulane Review, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Alabama Literary Review, OxMag, Superstition Review, The Griffin, Diverse Voices Quarterly, and The Critical Pass Review. His short story, “Wade,” was named the Annual Editor’s Choice of Best Work in Fiction by Inscape Magazine. In 2014, five of his poems were selected to be published as an individual chapbook by Red Ochre Press. Kuhl’s self-published book was awarded an honorable mention in the poetry category in the Writer’s Digest 15th Annual International Self-Published Book Awards, and he came in 10th in the Writer’s Digest Poetry Awards. He also placed first for my poem, “Agon,” in the Mississippi Poetry Society competition.
July 2016 | poetry
Only the best trickster gods
have wings. Beating away at
the dried browned grass,
they knead the air and earth together
in the stone bowl of a yeasty, wet spring,
fooling us with movement and stories
that only let us see shadowy parts of things.
There are layers and layers
of air and birdsong and grass
that only a woodcock can lay claim to
strutting in that flat dinner plate of prairie.
For us, each step closer is a snap of grass,
but the only way to know it is to lie on it
and to feel it’s sharp ceramic crack underneath you.
I can stand still, feel my feet in the fragile brotherhood
of all the things in motion—
fluid wings, the unsettled earth, the ungrown grass,
a frog-chorused April dusk against
that fluttery squeak of flight,
which is not so much an awakening,
but the audible refilling of the haunted earth.
by Paul Wiegel
Paul Wiegel is a Green Bay native and now writes from his home near the upper Fox River in Wisconsin. His work is forthcoming in The English Journal, Eunoia Review, and Hermeneutic Chaos Journal. He is the 2015 winner of the John Gahagan Poetry Prize.
